My son tells me we are above Kansas as I finish off the last of the chicken nuggets. Since they (the nuggets) were obtained at a high price involving a mad dash in the Atlanta airport, I continue chewing as he shares what he’s reading – and watching – on a screen embedded in the back of a seat on board Delta Flight 1165.

“502 miles per hour,” he marvels, going on to list the outside temperature, in-cabin temperature and other facts I barely hear, caught up as I am in my own moment of marveling.

If all goes well, I think to myself, we’ll soon be landing under a midday Montana sun. Pinch me.

Long forgotten is the car trouble that had us pulled over on the side of the road at 5:30 a.m. Never mind the flight delay that had us panicking about making our connection. Now I could relax and accept the stewardess’s offer of biscoff (something that looks a lot like a cookie) and try to memorize the look on the kids’ faces as they experience their first flights. It’s not often that we cover 2,000 miles in a day.

Funny how from a distance the world gets nice and orderly, spaced by the grids a bizzillion tiny homes and tiny yards and tiny driveways make. A plane seat can be a good spot to contemplate one’s own tininess in the big scheme of things, but my traveling companions prefer to debate the name of the river snaking its way across the landscape instead. So we do, until that before-dawn rising gets the best of us, and we fall asleep.

I wake up sometime due north of Denver, just in time to see the mountain ranges.

“Look!” I poke my daughter. “The Rockies!”

She strains to see, but it takes some convincing because peaks can look like blobs of chocolate pudding when you’re cruising at 32,029 feet. Snowcapped varieties finally appear on the horizon, leaving no room for doubt.

Yellowstone quickly fills three days on the calendar. Old Faithful blows on schedule, Mammoth Springs heats things up, and we wear coats and smiles while taking far too many pictures. Our only disappointment pertains to bears – or a lack of them. Bison, on the other hand, are a different story.

“There’s only so many you can see before they turn into cows,” yawns my son, and I have to admit it’s true. What stopped us in our tracks yesterday has us honking today, waving the gawkers ahead of us to move on, move on.

Our rental car is decidedly smaller than our own vehicle back home and becomes a discussion topic while we wait.

“You feel every bump on the road because it’s so close to the ground,” points out the bison-bored teenager.

“That’s okay,” his father responds. “When a car gets 40 miles to the gallon, your wallet is thicker, so there’s more padding.”

Which is good, because we mark some serious miles admiring the Tetons and futuristic-looking turbines in the Idaho sunset. The odometer keeps spinning as we cover Utah head to toe, too, and somewhere along that stretch of highway boasting 80 as the legal speed, my husband lets us know he’s missing Mississippi.

“Smell that?” he asks, poking me with an elbow.

“What?” I answer, just before I get a whiff of my own. It’s strong, and like those snow caps, leaves no room for doubt. Utah has skunks, too.

“Just like home,” he sighs, rolling down the window for more. “Just like home.”

Wesson resident Kim Henderson is a freelance writer who writes for The Daily Leader. Contact her at kimhenderson319@gmail.com.