The first time I flew on an airplane, I was a little over a month old and on my way to Florida. According to my mother, because I obviously do not have any recollection of the first few months of my life, the plane encountered some horrible turbulence that was so bad, it caused my mom to actually believe that we would not make it to our final destination, while I slept pleasantly through the entire traumatizing experience. Since then, I have been on an aircraft close to 100 times, most recently right now, as Northwest Airlines Flight 1924 awaits to depart from Gate A-29 and leave Detroit, Michigan on its way to JFK International Airport, and my hometown of Brooklyn, New York.

I love to fly. So much in fact, that I purposely try to book flights with layovers each time I travel, just so I can take off and land more than once, and so I can add yet another city to the long list of places I have visited. While most people see flying as a means to an end, I see flying as a vacation in itself, and a chance to see this wonderful country and all that it has to offer.

From the views out of the airplane window that are a true picture postcard of America, to the unique experience of sitting at an airport bar and on an aircraft next to people from literally all over the world who you will most probably never meet again, I look forward to the flight itself as much as the destination it will take me.

When I fly, I always make sure that, besides booking a flight with a layover, I always get a window seat, because nothing beats looking at entire towns thousands of feet below you as you quietly pass over them. As I look out my window and see these towns that appear to me to be no bigger than a laptop, I wonder what town I am looking at, what kind of people live in that town, what it would be like to live there, and if the townspeople know or even care that I am looking at them from the window of a passing plane.

Many times, while in the air, I have found a particular vehicle on a long stretch of highway that has caught my eye, which I follow as long as my sight will allow. I do this because I wonder who they are and where they are going. When you travel across this great country of ours as often as I do, you have no choice but to realize how small and insignificant we all are when compared to the size of the country we live in when seeing it from the air. I also often wonder how many times I was driving in a car while someone was staring at me from the window of a passing aircraft, wondering who I was and where I was going.

Be it day or night, the view of America from an airplane window is something I wish I could film and look at anytime I want. From the patchwork quilt of farmland that stretches across the Midwest, to the intricate "mish-mosh" of a large city, to the eerie darkness and blankness of an ocean, a plane's window is like having your own Viewmaster in the sky, with each slide being a different slice of Americana.

In today's society, we take many things for granted due to the simple fact that we are used to living with so many amenities. Before the invention of the aircraft, something that is so commonplace in our society that thousands of flights take off every day, people had no choice but to travel across America by train, boat, or vehicle, never seeing its beauty from above. Even now, as I looked at my fellow passengers as we took off just moments ago, many of them did not even look out of their airplane windows as our DC-9 aircraft lifted off the ground, proving that most people see air travel as nothing more than an airborne taxi, if only they knew what they were missing.

And now, with approximately one hour until we land at JFK, I plan to enjoy this next hour of air travel and eagerly await the next time I fly, which for me, can't come soon enough.