US State 10: California: Groundhog Day

Good morning sir, madam. Welcome to the blog.

My name is Gart Molden (according to one particularly inattentive hotel receptionist) and I am pleased to bring you this weeks journal (grin, flash the upper teeth).

Take a seat, here is this weeks email for your perusal (another grin).

I’ll return in a moment to take your drinks order…

Yes, I am in the good ol’ US of A. Land of service with a smile, fast food, Presidential primaries, Atkins Diet-mania and where no-one has ever heard the name ‘Gareth’.

I got here on Monday 8th March, a day that will live long in the memory, just as it was lived long in reality: my very own Groundhog Day.

This was the day when I crossed the temporal oddity that is the International Date Line. Officially it separates East from West, the start of one day from the start of another.

I awoke on Monday 8th March in Auckland. I spent the day wandering around and saying my mental goodbyes to a country that had welcomed me and which I had fallen in love with over five fantastic weeks. My flight from Auckland to Los Angeles left at 10 at night and took 12 hours...

The mind-bending thing is that as Auckland is 21 hours ahead of the US West Coast, the flight landed in LA at lunchtime on the 8th March. In one sense, I arrived a full nine hours before I took off...! In total, Monday 8th March 2004 lasted a grand total of 45 hours for me. Who needs Doctor Who?!

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