Travel Calculations

August 1, 2012

My life has been packed to the gills with activity. Time to post and catch up.

When  my friends here in Ginatilan would ask me when I planned to return to the U.S., I would shrug and say "I don't have any plans to return." Shit happens. Plans change. In the middle of June, I was notified that I needed to go back to Ohio to take care of some business, and get it done before July 1st. So, I got a last-minute ticket, hopped the plane and was in Ohio lickety split, compared to any other method of travel.

$2000 is a lot of money to pay for some thirty hours of travel torture. It's not worth putting myself through it all for a just a week in the U.S. and then return home immediately. I decided a month would be about right. I could more-easily justify that 2 grand spent, if I divided it by 30 and thought of it as a daily expense.

So, the sojourn began: Emelie, Shane and I left our house on the first air-conditioned bus heading for Cebu City. Four hours later we were at the south bus terminal, hailing a taxi to take us to Cherry's Pension House in Mandaue, just outside of "the City". After making arrangements for Emelie and Shane for the night, we headed for the airport. My flight to Manila would leave at 10PM.

They dropped me off and went back to the hotel. My God, I felt lonely as I walked through the security check point. I missed my wife and little girl already.

When I got to Manila, I spent the rest of the night laying on a bench outside the International Terminal, waiting for the check-in early the next morning. The plane left at six and headed for Narita, Japan. For some reason beyond my comprehension, we had to deplane in Narita, go through the security check again, then wait at a gate to get back on the same plane we took out of Manila. It's all very official and very senseless. And it takes an additional hour and half or so. Oh well.

From Narita, we headed northwest (or maybe it was northeast, not sure. It doesn't matter much, since the world is mostly round, anyway. You always get to where you're going no matter which direction you start out. If time is a consideration, though, it's best to take the shortest route). Geography was never a subject that caught my interest, but I think we flew over Korea, and Russia and jumped into Canadian airspace on the way to Detroit airport.

Aside:
You know, it's a funny thing, we always think of the world as being divided into countries. It isn't. When you fly over Russia, you see mountains and rivers and lakes; dry areas, wet areas and such. Some snow here; some dessert there. The rest of the world is about the same, with the addition of oceans. Narry an intracontinental boundary, anywhere. Our artificial, political divisions don't really exist.

Someday we may come together as a world team, our political and religious boundaries dissolved, and we will have peace on earth, which means we will be free...free to focus our violence on alien lifeforms and planets everywhere, killing and annihilating all the new "thems" that we've decided are a threat to "us". We'll have an opportunity to create a fresh, new set of differences. "We can drag in our old fears and prejudices and justifications and rocket them to new heights, for the exploitation of our galaxy and beyond. Can't wait. Makes me want to sing the national anthem and vote republican.

Back to Center:
Okay, so, 12 hours of sitting on my ass from Narita to Detroit, with a few meals, a movie or two, a couple of chapters in a novel, one time through the "old geezer" songs of my MP3 player, a few winks - a very few winks, an inordinately inadequate few winks - and we're there. Voila! Back to earth and the U.S.A.! An hour or so more, laying over in Detroit, then a short jaunt to Cleveland. And then a one-hour drive to the old homestead in Massillon, Ohio. Home. Plop! I did it!

From the Philippines to Ohio, I traveled 12 time zones in reverse, at a speed of about 500mph, while the earth rotated in the opposite direction at about 1,000 miles per hour, at the equator, which means that I was going forward, into the future, at the rate of only 500mph. At that rate, it would take me 48 hours to travel for one day.

The plane left, for the direct flight from Japan to Detroit, at about 1PM on Tuesday afternoon, and arrived in Detroit at 3PM on Thursday. I took this into consideration, beginning immediately after reboarding the plane in Narita, Japan, and tried to develop an equation that would take into account all the variables and constants and spit out a meaningful number on the right side of the equal sign.

I ordered a beer and contemplated. When the numbers were all there, in my mind, I started calculating. I began with addition, my favorite and an easy warmup for subtraction, division and multiplication. The numbers were flying around in my head. Another beer slowed them down just a little. When I exhausted my supply of known calculations, I brought in tangent, sine and cosine, since we were traveling on an arc, anyway. I got stuck somewhere between the equator and the cosine of an arc produced by the minute hand on a clock, which has passed from 12 to 4:30. I went back and rounded off all numbers to two decimal places and drank a third beer. The combination produced a number: 2.4. I was satisfied.