Crossing the Date Line

"You ready for another one?" Bryan leaned over and asked his wife of just over a month Jane.

"Another one I think I can handle," she replied, "it's two more that I'm not so sure about."

Their flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles had gotten a late start, and Bryan and Jane would have only an hour and a half to make their connecting flight to Fiji. From Fiji they would then catch another flight that would take them to their final destination, Auckland, New Zealand. Neither one of them had ever been to New Zealand - Jane had never seen the Pacific Ocean - but when Bryan found a job online with a research firm in Auckland, it had seemed like just the kind of adventure they'd like to go on. Exotic location, but still English-speaking; an interesting job for Bryan that would give him some industry experience after his decades in school and a nice retreat for Jane to finish writing her own dissertation. Sitting on the crowded 767 for five hours, though, had given them just the right amount of banal reality to make the impending adventure seem real and a little daunting.

A cranky Delta stewardess informed Bryan and Jane that the Pacific Airways flight to Fiji left from terminal 2 - the international terminal. Unfortunately, upon arriving in terminal 2, sweating from the excursion of their over-packed carry-on bags, there was no flight to Fiji; "No Pacific Airways flights at all," a jolly security officer told them. "What you want," the officer explained, "is an Air New Zealand co-chair flight: that's on the other side of the airport, terminal 4." Rushing along as fast as their laden computer bags would allow, Bryan and Jane reached the Air New Zealand counter twenty minutes before their plane was due to take off. "When do you return to the United States?" asked the interminably slow ticket counter worker. "Not for a while," answered Bryan, "we have two-year work visas. We don't need a return ticket." Though the ticket counter worker did not seem to be completely convinced, he allowed Bryan and Jane to pass through anyway, taking their baggage numbers, issuing them boarding passes, and wishing them a good flight.

Once inside the plane, Bryan and Jane settled in for the second leg of their trip. Periodically, a map would appear on the screens strategically placed around the cabin, detailing the path that the plane was taking: lots of blue punctuated by tiny dots as they flew within 100km of tiny islands most Americans have never even heard off. There was no turning back as the garrulous lights of LA faded away. Bryan and Jane dosed on and off over the 11 hour flight, but both were awake to mark the passage of the little pixeled airplane as it crossed the jagged edges of the date line. Tuesday, March 4 had just completely disappeared; they were in the future now.