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Orange County, CA (Dexter)
11/26/04 Last Day – Orange County, California.Song of the Day: Home Sweet Home
Ever had jet lag? Where your body just feels messed up from flying and because you‘re in a way different time zone than what you‘re used to? Well I had it pretty bad by now. My body didn‘t know if it was morning or night. And on top of that, I had crossed the international date line the night before last when I landed in Alaska.
The whole international date line thing is confusing to most people. I know, that concept always throws me too. Basically, everyone knows that if you fly from say, LA to New York, it not only takes five hours or so, but New York is three time zones, or three hours ahead of LA as well. So if you leave LA at 9:00 in the morning, you get into NYC at 5:00 at night. So there‘s 24 time zones in the world, and every time you travel 1,000 miles or so, you‘re in a new time zone. In my case, since I was flying east everyday, I was going ahead in time zones. So imagine, if I left say, Dubai at 9:00 am, flew 3 1/2 hours to Hyderabad, India, they‘re one time zone ahead, so it‘s not 12:30 pm there, it‘s 1:30 pm. Take off again one hour later at 2:30 India time, fly another 3 1/2 hours to Bangkok, and they‘re still another time zone ahead, so it‘s not 6:00 pm, it‘s 7:00. So even if I left early in the morning, it was always night by the time I stopped for the day.
So see, every day I‘m losing between two and four hours, depending on how many time zones I‘m flying through. So by the time I got to Tokyo, I was 17 hours ahead of California time. So I‘ve actually lost almost a whole day.
So what happens when you hit the 24th time zone? Well that‘s the international date line, and it cuts right in between Russia and Alaska at the Bering Strait. And what happens there is the day resets. So when you pass through the international date line, you do go ahead one hour, but you also go back one day! Confusing, I know. I just think of it as regaining all the hours I lost over the trip.
So when I took off from Tokyo that day, it was 12:00 noon Wednesday Tokyo time. I flew for ten hours or so, went through six time zones or so, and crossed the international date line. So the bottom line in all this is that I actually landed at 4:30 am on Wednesday morning! I went back in time. Cool.
So yeah, my body clock was pretty seriously messed up by this time, but I didn‘t really even feel tired cause this was the day I‘d be flying home. This last flight from Seattle to John Wayne airport in Orange County was 2 1/2 hours. It was sort of cold and rainy when I left Seattle (no surprise) but as I climbed through the clouds I got a good look at Mt. Rainier, which is quite a mountain.
The rest of the flight was a no-brainer. As I got closer to LA the weather kept getting better and better. Southern California was looking really good for November, sunny and about 75 degrees. As I came in towards the airport I could see all the landmarks of SoCal I had left a week before. There was downtown LA, the Queen Mary, the Huntington Pier. They all looked a little different somehow, the way that things seem to change when it‘s really that you‘ve gained a new perspective on those things.
All right, enough personal exploration. I landed and it was pretty cool, dude. Where‘s the closest In-n-Out?
Note: Check out Dexter's photo journal from the trip in Images
