Best things you’ve seen

May 2013 I was flying from Moscow to Novosibirsk in Siberia. It was a particularly clear sky at 37,000 feet and out of my seat window I captured a stunning vista of the moon above the horizon.

Here’s the contentious thing; I could make out the curvature of the earth! I got the photo with the horizon dead centre of the optical axis and when drawing a line from edge to edge the horizon is on fact visible curved on the photo.

@divegeester
Best things you’ve seen

The harbour at Kristiansand, Norway, after a 37 hour crossing from Harwich on the roughest seas I've ever seen.

Jerzy Dudek saving a penalty in the Ataturk Stadium in Istanbul May 2005.

(Bonus Trivia: It didn't happen on the date shown in the record books, extra time took the match beyond midnight in Istanbul.)

Climbing a mountain in the Philippines. Up thru the river and waterfalls to the deep swimming pond at the top. And exploring the Japanese caves there near Mt. Pinatubo. Jumping/skydiving on a sunset load over Space Center Fl. w/a cold beer in my jumpsuit. Jumping with the space shuttle taking off.

The Border Hotel in Kirk Yetholm in Scotland after an unavoidable 45 km trek across the Cheviot Hills from Byrness in England, seen as being the end of the 430 km Pennine Way path whose southern end is in Edale, Derbyshire, about 14 days of walking away. It was long enough ago - 39 years - for the owner of the Border Hotel [a sight for sore eyes and sore feet] to be still giving walkers who'd just completed the "PW" a free pint of beer. I don't know if that philanthropic tradition continues. I completed it 41 years ago as well but was too young to be served alcohol on that occasion!

Yosemite in the winter

Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. Taken up to in in a wagon drawn by horses. Breath-taking view.

YouTube

the smile on the face of the child who has just been fed

@rookie54 said
the smile on the face of the child who has just been fed

This is a great post.

@rookie54 said
the smile on the face of the child who has just been fed

Could you describe this particular experience you have had?

@divegeester said
Could you describe this particular experience you have had?

once it was a great-niece, prolly 3, i gave her permission to eat chocolate cake with her fingers

several hundred times it was kids at the community center, in line with their plates and sporks

once it was a daughter, the first time we allowed her to eat spaghetti by herself


no, that time it was me grinning

This. It’s my dad, 25 years after his initial diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, shooting a solid gold grouping.

YouTube

@rookie54 said
the smile on the face of the child who has just been fed

This has a distinct whiff of schmaltz signalling about it. Hope I'm wrong.

@fmf said
This has a distinct whiff of schmaltz signalling about it. Hope I'm wrong.

Here's a schmaltzy one:

My wife was very ill in the run-up to giving birth to our first child. She spent a month in hospital while planned induced premature-birth deliveries were postponed every couple of days as her condition stabilized.

She finally gave birth after the full nine months. Henry was born by caesarean section and I was waiting very nervously in the corridor ~ as Japanese hospital rules would have it.

I had rather freaked myself out by isolating myself from the other humans in that corridor [mostly hospital supplies salesmen] having made an odd decision to listen to tumultuous ominous abstract trombone jazz music from Sweden very loud in my earphones for an hour.

So I was fragile, to say the least, as the double door swung open and tiny Henry in an incubator on wheels was whisked past me on his way to the ICU.

Like so many newborn babies, he looked like Winston Churchill, but, despite that, his little face, at that moment, was one of the best things I'd ever seen.

@fmf said
Here's a schmaltzy one:

My wife was very ill in the run-up to giving birth to our first child. She spent a month in hospital while planned induced premature-birth deliveries were postponed every couple of days as her condition stabilized.

She finally gave birth after the full nine months. Henry was born by caesarean section and I was waiting very nervously in the corridor ...[text shortened]... chill, but, despite that, his little face, at that moment, was one of the best things I'd ever seen.

Like you, though not as harrowing by any stretch of the imagination, the birth of my children. 😍