23 Horse-ridden Days

Air travel is truly amazing. I woke up on September 9th in Washington D.C. at 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. I woke up on September 11th at 32,000 feet above the Pacific to an incredible sunrise. And here I am at 4 a.m (International Date Line East or New Zealand Standard Time) on September 12th lying in bed in our house truck wishing the rooster next door the most painful of deaths.

The body does not adjust to time changes as easily as my trusty travel alarm clock. So here I lay suffering the pangs of pre-dawn jet lag.

I heard once that this new-fangeled ailment exists because the human mind can only adapt to new surroundings as quickly as the human body could propel itself into them. Jet lag wouldn't exist if we limited our pace of travel to man-speed, not machine-speed. How far could someone possibly walk in a day? 100 miles? Is that the evolutionary limit to the amount we should travel per day?

I'm willing to stretch that to a horse-ridden day. I remember learning in elementary school that the conspicuous symmetry of the midwestern territories is due to the limits of one man riding one horse as far as he could in a day. (Mr. Oklahoma should have gotten a better horse). If that's true we can up our speed to about 300 miles per day.

It's about 7,000 miles from D.C. to New Zealand. So my mind should be arriving in another 22 days. Wish me luck until then.