San Francisco — Amsterdam: Over the Arctic Circle

Over the summer of 2022, I travelled to Switzerland with my sister to visit my exchange student brother. On our way I enjoyed the best plane ride of my life. I love plane rides. When I was younger, my dream job was to be a pilot and I always loved to look out the window and to take in the crazy views from 30,000 feet up. I believe this is one of the reasons why I enjoy drone photography so much today. Anyways, our flight had a layover in Amsterdam. So we flew from SFO to Amsterdam on a large KLM jet and then took a smaller plane from Amsterdam to Basel, Switzerland. I had flown to Europe once before when I was 9 but we had a layover in New York. What made this flight different was that for the first time ever I was going to fly over the Arctic circle. Our flight departed from SFO at six in the evening, about two hours before sunset. Once we took off, our flight traveled North-East over Washington State, over Canada, and then eventually over Greenland. The spectacular part about this flight was that just as the sun was about to set, we had made it so far north to an area of the globe where in summer, there is daylight all day long. The sun traveled along the horizon for the entire flight, creating the experience of a 10 hour sunset. As we neared our landing in Amsterdam, our sunset turned into a sunrise as the sun rose over the horizon for the next day to begin. I did not sleep at all on that flight. Instead, I stared out the window, enthused, and enjoyed the scenery of one of the most desolate, yet amazing parts of this Earth. Here I share with you just a few of the 500 photos that I took throughout the flight. The photos are in chronological order and it is shocking how drastically different the weather and environment could change in just a matter of minutes. Enjoy!