The things you notice

When you fly out of Cincinatti after your layover, heading west, the farms below are all smallish with irregular borders; the roads are curvy and run into each other at strange angles as they wiggle around the little hills, run next to rivers and streams and property lines. But, within an hour of flying, the roads straighten out into a nearly perfect grid, the hills flatten out and the farms become rectangular and many times larger. Houses are miles apart, on perfectly straight roads. Another hour of flying west and the farms are enourmous rectangles, then they become squares with huge irrigation circles in them. Sometimes you can't even see houses or buildings - nothing but crops.

Then, somewhere in eastern Colorado there's a thin and wiggly road. Nobody farms on the west side of that road; all the farms are on the eastern side. On the western side is nothing but low rolling brown hills and tiny houses stuck at the ends of skinny dirt roads. Maybe it's cattle ranching country, but you can't tell from 25,000 feet.

And then you're in Denver, and you're dizzy from the altitude.