@paulnmerrie I really love your photo! (especially without the airplane trail! 😉 )
You may find better results healing things on your phone out with Photoshop Fix. (free on the AppStore. You may or may not need a free Adobe account. Can’t remember!) If you’d like a more powerful healing and selection engine, Pixelmator is available on your iPhone for just $5.
I’m going to be the odd one out here and say your photo is better “uncropped”, or at least better in a portrait orientation than in a landscape one. I know, shocking anyone would say that! 🙂
There is a lot of open space in the original photo with the sky and road, but in my mind that doesn’t mean a bad composition. In fact, the open space in combination with the rich colors promotes a dreamy and yet clean feel that I love. I feel like some of that openness is lost when you crop out the open space.
I do have a bias, though. Leaving it in a portrait orientation keeps me from looking at tiny details and instead helps me to look at the whole photo, which in turn really opens up the photo’s design potential. The “openness” and clean feeling I mentioned earlier really frees me as a designer to place graphics on the photo without worrying about the photo getting too “busy.” It is because of this that I would highly recommend you submit your photo in the latest photo assignment! It definitely fits the brief in my mind and would certainly look great on the cover of a book.