Now, it's generally known that usually when people go to Australia from the US they lose an entire day due to the Date Line crossing. Actually, Bill Bryson has a rather indignant commentary on this very phenomenon, which I'm stealing from someone else's blog (though it's originally from In a Sunburned Country):
Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international date line. I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5. For me there was no January 4. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of earth, it appears I had no being.
I find it a little uncanny, to say the least. I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said, “Passengers are advised that on some crossings twenty-four-hour loss of existence may occur” (which is, of course, how they would phrase it, as if it happened from time to time), you would probably get up and make inquiries, grab a sleeve, and say, “Excuse me.” There is, it must be said, a certain metaphysical comfort in knowing that you can cease to have material form and it doesn’t hurt at all, and, to be fair, they do give you back the day on the return journey when you cross the date line in the opposite direction and thereby manage somehow to arrive in Los Angeles before you left Sydney, which in its way, of course, is an even neater trick.
Well, here's the cool thing. I am, of course, gaining a day as I travel home across the Pacific; I left Sydney at ten in the morning Friday and I land in Los Angeles at 9am the same day.* However, because of my West-to-East route around the globe to get to Australia, I never lost that day in transit. Somehow I have managed to cheat the system and earn an extra day of life.Of course, there really is no such thing as a free day-- I only get to live Friday twice because of the 17- and 16-hour days I took earlier on my trip around the globe. And, to be fair, my Fridays are both a little less than the usual 24 hours as well. So rather than cutting a day out in one fell swoop, I took the gentler option of giving up a few hours here and a few hours there.
But the end result is that I am now allowed to say that I have experienced every single date since November 13, 1995, and August 19, 2016 twice. And I'm not even lying (technically).
This trip represents another marker for me: the final leg of my journey around the world. Out of curiosity, I researched circumnavigation and found the following rules for anyone who would like to say they've done it:
- Start and finish at the same point, traveling in one general direction
- Reach two antipodes
- Cross the equator
- Cross all longitudes
- Cover a minimum of 40,000 km
OK, let's see how I do:
- I'm going to pretend that I fly from LA to Memphis for the purposes of this evaluation, since I essentially fly over Memphis to get to Atlanta. So we'll say that I start at Memphis and end at Memphis, and take out the Atlanta leg, which is useless and dumb anyway.
- The two antipodes rule is the one that's most iffy. I'm within 1000 km, depending on the exact route my flight across the Pacific takes (somewhere over there being Rome's antipode), which actually isn't bad. Wouldn't fly for an official record, but I'll pretend it's a rounding error.
- I cross the equator twice, once over the South China Sea, and once over the Pacific
- I've crossed all longitudes... I'm kind of confused at how one couldn't if one always travels the same general direction, but whatever.
- I added up all of my routes, and I'm right at 40,000 km.
*Actually, as I published this I noticed that I've already crossed the date line, but haven't made it to midnight yet-- so suddenly I've found myself back in Thursday!
Crossing equator
ReplyDeleteReaching the antipodes
THAT's a traveller!