This is what you see from above on a Spirit Airlines flight

One of the few benefits of the window seat (nothing beats being able to get up to use the bathroom without having to awkwardly ask your neighbor to get out) is the view you see outside.

On a particularly cloudless day, flying out to another city on a low-cost airline can offer you the kind of view that you’d otherwise have to pay several hundred dollars to see on a helicopter tour. Depending on the city one is flying out of and the weather on that day, a window seat can be a great way to get a good view for a ticket you are already paying for to get to your destination.

Related: This is what it's like to take a 19-hour train from New York to Chicago

I recently flew on a Spirit Airlines  (SAVE)  plane from New York’s LaGuardia International Airport to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I was initially unhappy to get a window seat on a full flight (as the entire flight takes just over two hours, I booked the cheapest available fare and did not pay for any extras such as seat selection) but enjoyed some lovely views during the journey.

Queens, clouds and eventually Lake Michigan

Even though I would classify myself as an experienced traveler who spends a significant portion of the year on airplanes, I still cannot help myself from taking that window photo of the runway on the rare occasions that I’m stuck in a window seat (if there is even any option, I will always go for aisle.)

LaGuardia’s Terminal A from which Spirit flights leave has a retro feel to it while the “Howdy” on Spirit planes’ wings make for cheery pictures (my first Spirit flight ever was to Texas which once led me to mistakenly believe that this was some kind of special quirk for that particular flight.)

As the plane took off, I got a beautiful view of Manhattan’s skyline in the background. The skyscrapers are eventually replaced by the single- and two-story houses of the Queens borough and, finally, the plane reaches the altitude at which you can see nothing but clouds. I took a lot of amateur cloud pictures but will only share the better ones here.

The window seat has only one big benefit: the view

Two hours and thirty minutes later, I started to see the outline of Lake Michigan on the plane’s descent. As somebody who has only ever lived along the coast, I am always surprised by how vast it looks — so unlike any of the smaller British Columbia mountain lakes I am used to and almost like a sea in which you will never be able to see the edges. 

All of this got me thinking about perspective and how different many things look from above. Strange white round spots turn out to be golf courses while highway stretches look much longer than the 5-6 minutes they would take to traverse by car. Is that thing a school field? A park? A forest? I’m sure I’m not the only one who has asked herself such questions as things slowly start to become more visible with the plane’s descent.

The early stretches of Chicago are covered by little clouds and, soon enough, we are on the tarmac at O’Hare Airport. Sometimes people take flights just to get some in-air shots and I can’t say I don’t understand why they would want to.