Day ??? - The Lost Day

So, in a previous post, I related how we'd left Walla Walla at 5:00 a.m. Thursday, November 30. 

We arrived Seattle 5:50 a.m., again on Thursday, November 30.

We departed for Honolulu and arrived at 1:30 p.m., again on Thursday, November 30.  Then we boarded our flight to Auckland and arrived Aucklamd

At 11:30 p.m. Friday, December 1.  In a short half hour (by the time we'd cleared Passport Control and candy bar inspection) it would be Saturday, December 2.  

Now, I'd heard all about the International Date Line.  But I'd never experienced it.  Conceptually, it makes sense, but to experience its effects is a new experience for me.

In his book "In a Sunburned Country" (which I happen to be reading in anticipation of making landfall in Australia) Bill Bryson said it much better than I ever could, so herewith, the pertinent passage from Bryson's book, which I highly recommend:

 I hope you enjoy the passage as much as I did:

 "Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from" 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 that 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 the day back 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.

 Now, I vaguely understand the principles involved here. I can see that there has to be a notional line where one day ends and the next begins, and that when you cross that line temporal oddities will necessarily follow. But that still doesn’t get away from the fact that on any trip between America and Australia you will experience something that would be, in any other circumstance, the starkest impossibility. However hard you train or concentrate or watch your diet, no matter how many steps you take on the StairMaster, you are never going to get so fit that you can cease to occupy space for twenty-four hours or be able to arrive in one room before you left the last one." So there you have it.

And now, as I post this, it is Monday, December 4, here in Auckland, New Zealand on a stunningly beautiful and bright summer day.