It's 10 pm and I'm Watching the Sun Rise

From Los Angeles to Citudella, Menorca, Spain

I just wanted to post a short blog with some random observations and comments that I made while traveling from Los Angeles to Menorca; which will be my home for the next 3 weeks. Most of the fragmented thoughts are written in the present tense, as they were when they floated through my head. This will cause this entry to be atypical in comparison with my usual entries. Enjoy nonetheless.

What did people do before electronics? Before cells phones and personal computers, built-into-the-seat-back personal entertainment consoles, iPods and iPads? I’m sitting on the plane for the first leg of my trip, a nice little 6 hours plane ride and realizing that I’m ten thousand feet in the air without anything to do. I stupidly packed all my unread books in my checked baggage and only brought the book with 40 pages left in my carry-on. The personal entertainment system on the plane is on the fritz and only works for one out of every 20 people and guess what?…I’m not one of those people. The guy next to me is giving me pitying looks as I ask the flight attendant whether they can fix the system, all while he contently plays some D&D type game on his iPad. I don’t have a pack of playing cards, nor really a wish to play endless games of solitaire, which leaves me with but two options (discounting those that will surely get me locked up as soon as we land), stare out the window at the inky blackness of deep night some more, or go to sleep. Guess I’ll opt for the latter and trick my body into thinking it’s not really noon….I mean it can’t be because it’s black outside, right?

It’s 10 pm and I’m watching the sun come up. There’s something surreal about that. Scientists say that it’s impossible to travel through time, either forwards or backwards, but they’ve obviously never been on a plane crossing multiple time zones before. It’s 10 pm in LA, where I started this journey from; my watch is set to 1 am, the time it was in Montreal as I docked and raced to catch the next leg of my trip, as Hurricane Irene threatened to close down the airport; and the sun is just breaking across the horizon, creating a magnificent array of blues and reds as 7 am rolls around over Spain. I’m 45 minutes from landing in Barcelona and then it’s another forty-five minute flight to Menorca, two buses, and a short walk and I’ll be at my destination. It’ll be a total of 24 hours of traveling from Point A to Point B, or 33 hours at the speed of travel.

After my third flight and my first bus ride, I end up at the main bus terminal in Mao, one of the main cities on the island of Menorca. As I’m perusing the time table for the connecting bus that I need to take, I glance over and see an obviously confused fellow traveler. A few seconds of awkward conversation and it’s determined that we’re both headed to the same place. This is good. Now I have a travel buddy and know one of my fellow archaes.

MJ, my new friend, and I are talking and he asks where I’m staying for the evening. I tell him at the dorms, where else? Then he proceeds to tell me I messed up and am a day early. A borrowed phone and a call confirm that this is in fact the case, and that I am quite possibly booked out a day late as well. Not quite sure how I managed to mess up that much, but at least it’s a day early on the onset and a day late at the end, instead of the other way around. And besides, I think this way I got out before Irene turned Montreal into a waterlogged oasis that you couldn’t get in or out of.

Now it's off to bed in hopes I can persuade my body into thinking I have jumped nine times zones and it really is just another day.