I remember on a nighttime flight up north my jet just happened to fly over Disney World when they were having a fireworks display. We were so high up it wasn’t immediately obvious what was going on. The Magic Kingdom was all lit up, the roads around it formed an odd geometrical pattern and the fireworks made it all look very strange and wonderful. It looked like a platoon of quivering neon sea urchins having an orgy.

It took me a while to figure out what it was, especially since Orlando was not on the rhumb line between my takeoff and destination points. Later, I realized airliners probably don’t fly as the crow does between cities, but are restricted to certain sky lanes for safety reasons.