My fiancée will be heading back to good old Minnesota today after five days spent in Jamaica. I’m excited for a bunch of obvious reasons, but I’m also excited for a reason that may not be quite so obvious – this gives me a chance to really see what Google Earth has to offer.

I downloaded the basic Google Earth program for free the other day, and I haven’t done much with it. The program is essentially, as far as I can tell, a big version of Google’s online mapping, but with a lot of extra features and worldwide coverage. That’s probably a pretty simplistic explanation, but I’m a pretty simplistic user at this point.

But today I’m going to try something a little more exciting than just flying around a virtual globe and seeing the sights. Today I’m going to try to track my fiancée’s flight in real time as she leaves Kingston for Atlanta, and then from Atlanta back to Minneapolis.

Check out more about Google Earth and download the program at http://earth.google.com/.

Check out the site that I’m trying to use to track this flight at http://fboweb.com/antest/ge/intro.aspx?old=1.