Okay, this might be old hat to a lot of guys but I just found this. I downloaded the latest update of Google Earth and was playing around with it.... it has a flight simulator in it.
So instead of just panning across an area... fly over it.
Awesome.
I used it to fly from Lapoint Utah to Vernal Utah and looked closely at the detail... Wow.
http://earth.google.com/intl/en/userguide/v4/flightsim/index.html