My wife Wendy returned last week from a trip to New Zealand.
She was there for more than a week visiting friends who live near the country’s biggest city of Auckland (which, according to its residents, is properly pronounced “awkland”).
There’s a 19-hour time difference between New Zealand and the U.S. Central time zone, where the Ozarks lies. Let me tell you – that can mess with your mind.
But before I throw out some time-related brain busters, here’s a little bit more about where Wendy went.
New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere and is extremely remote – it’s about 900 miles east of Australia and 600 miles south of Fiji. It’s primarily made up of two large islands – the North Island and the South Island. With an area of 56,308 square miles, the South Island is the world’s 12th largest island, while the North Island is the 14th biggest island, at 43,082 square miles.
Auckland is about the size of San Diego, with a population of a bit less than 1.5 million. That accounts for a whopping 32-percent of the country’s entire population.
New Zealand a place where fjords meet high mountains, dense forests meet open plains, and it’s well known as the location for the filming of the three Lord of the Rings and three Hobbit movies.
Because of its location near the International Dateline, New Zealand is pretty much the first country in the world to experience a given day. In turn, Kiwis (as the country’s citizens are called) are often shown on U.S. television as the planet’s first folks to celebrate a New Year, which of course means they were the first to find out Y2K was nothing to worry about.
But while I understand the Earth’s rotation and the dateline concept and the fact it was summer in New Zealand while Wendy was there, this 19-hour thing was hard for me to grasp, and no matter how much I ponder it, it’s still mind-boggling. Here are two amazing examples.
Wendy first flew to Los Angeles, and actually stayed overnight with another friend who lives there. The next day, she left LAX (L.A. International Airport) at about 9:45 p.m.
After a 13-hour flight, she arrived in Auckland at about 7:30 a.m. – SATURDAY. When I first looked at her flight itinerary and saw that equation, I went right into mind overload and stayed there for about two weeks.
Somehow, she missed Friday. I guess she flew right over it. Friday passed underneath the Boeing 787 she and a bunch of other people were aboard.
Wasn’t there a made-for-TV Stephen King mini-series about something like that? If not, there should have been.
I was like, “where did Friday go?”
While she was in New Zealand, we corresponded mostly by email because trying to figure out when to “Skype” was pretty hard since in Auckland it was always sometime tomorrow or the middle of the night or the next day (or whatever).
So after traveling forward in time on the way there and then finishing her stay south of the equator, Wendy boarded a Boeing 777 time machine that took her back to North America, and basically experienced her own version of the classic Bill Murray movie, “Groundhog Day.” She boarded the jumbo jet at 7:45 p.m. on a Tuesday and arrived in L.A. at – here it comes – 10 a.m. THE SAME DAY.
So she basically got all the way to nighttime, spent more than a dozen hours in the air, and then more or less started the same day over again. I think Punxsutawney Phil was there to greet her when she got off the plane.
Meanwhile, I guess someone, somewhere was skipping that particular Tuesday. That’s downright confusing.
Wendy stayed in L.A. a few nights with her friend and then made it back to Lambert Airport in St. Louis last Friday evening. Not surprisingly, she slept quite a bit last weekend.
Her body had to figure out what day it was.