So we set off from Auckland, New Zealand this morning on a 9AM flight only to go even further East (THREE AND A HALF HOURS FURTHER EAST) to Sydney, Australia in order to catch a much bigger plane with a lot more people on it willing to take us to San Francisco. We got on that plane and doubled back over the same route we'd just taken in the opposite direction, only this time headed for the United States. Yes it was SEVEN HOURS+ since we'd taken off on the first plane and were then just back at our 9AM starting point .. but who's counting.
See our tiny 9AM plane just below the 'midddle' of this photograph leaving New Zealand and heading, actually, the wrong way. California is to the RIGHT.
Using Mr. Green's fist as the Earth and my 'pointer' (finger) as the Sun, I think I did a bang-up job explaining the International Date Line, a point I'll thrill you with another time. Mr. Green showed his finest colors explaining something which you probably grasped decades ago but which seems the height of profound and surreal to me: that on leaving Australia and heading back toward the USA (the US being off the RIGHT hand side of the above photograph) that we were actually heading back into last night, the night we'd just slept through. It's really down to basics here.
Here was our last glimpse of New Zealand, looking remarkably like a map:
A tiny bit of New Zealand
And here is a visual explanation why this blog is especially short tonight. I slept less than an hour in the almost twenty-four hours it took us to get from New Zealand to Calgary, Alberta where I am right now and on the verge of hallucinating from tiredness.
#NoFilters