RE needing to be on the ground:

My favorite example of why you have to go and see things for yourself happened in Spain. We were on our way south to Ronda, returning after long years of missing it, and drove down into the little valley of a pueblo blanco that was strangely Mediterranean pink in the glaring summer sun, more like the south of France than Spain. I thought that the whole town had been painted in some kind of Analusian folly...until a cloud passed in front of the sun and the entire village changed from pink to white...revealing that the pink was sunlight reflecting off the red tiles of roof terraces. We stopped on a mountainside and couldn't stop watching the town across the valley change colors with the passing clouds, unimaginably beautiful, again and again seeing new details that kept us there for a long time.