Coyote Blog

Earlier this month, my wife and I spent a bit of time in Europe.  We started in France, which this time of year is 9 time zones ahead of Phoenix.  This time change is a problem for my wife, who really gets hit hard by jetlag.  To deal with this, we do something all of our friends think is crazy.

For the week before we go, we try to shift our lives as much as one time zone per day.  In reality, this means we wake up at 6am, then 5am the next day, then 4am to as early as 3am or even 2 on the day of the trip.  By the time we leave home, we are waking up as early as 11am in the time of our destination, and as a bonus we are ready to sleep when we get on the plane (Phoenix has a nice 10 hour direct BA flight to London in the evening).  The adjustment process to the new wakeup times is not totally effective because we don't have the sunlight signals at 3AM to get our brains thinking it is day time, but it has really been extraordinarily effective making the first 3-4 days of our vacations travelling east more enjoyable.

When we explain this to our friends, they treat us like the guy at parties who sings the praises of taking freezing cold showers every morning -- they sort of see the logic but can't imagine punishing themselves like this.

But here is our thinking: The value of a day on a vacation, almost anywhere, is way higher than the value of a random day at home.  Vacation days are rarer and require a much higher financial investment than days at home.  So doing things that make a few days at home less comfortable but that make a few days on vacation more comfortable seems to be a good tradeoff.