As a city boy, I didn’t have a true appreciation of how big thousands of square miles of wilderness actually was. This area of the planet was temperate to sub-tropical forest. Well, I assumed it was forest. Whatever it was, it stretched from horizon to horizon, with occasional breaks for meadows and rocky bluffs. Truthfully, someone flying a small airplane over this wouldn’t have been able to tell they weren’t on Earth. I felt a momentary pang of homesickness.