Mount Rainier is Huge.

I've never seen a mountain this big before. The woman next to me on the plane (who owns a llama farm in St. Charles County, incidentally, and she says llamas are like potato chips, you can't have just one and pretty soon you've got a whole damn bag. She and her boeing-engineer husband are retiring to seattle but having trouble finding property that will allow their herd of llamas. Apparently the anti-llama regulations in Seattle are pretty strict.) Anyway, we were looking on the right side of the plane for Rainier, peering down at distant peeks of white speckled with black. The peaks looked like a heard of very pointy cows. I was searching for a mountain perhaps twice as big as the rest, but, I assumed, comparably the size of a large dairy barn.

Then, the captain came on and said "Now, if you'll look to your left..." And across the isle, there it was. As high as our plane!!! A wall of white & jagged rocks moving past the left windows like a mural on a subway line.

I was like a three year old, squirming in my seat, trying to get a better look. But half of the people on the left side of the plane weren't even looking. Miss too-much-hairspray was so buried in last month's Reader's Digest to even glance up and was blocking my view with all her hair twirling. I don't understand; I will never loose interest in gluing my nose to the plane window.

On a positive note, when all the REI SPEs sent back their flight and meal preferences for this conference, a large percentage of them requested window seats. That is a good sign.