Almost Time To Go

As I start writing this the time is 5:10 P.M. My flight leaves at 9:10. I'm expecting Graydyn home from work around 6:00, at which point he'll take me to the airport for my flight. This trip has been a long time in the planning, and it's finally about to kick off. Honestly, at this point I couldn't be more nervous. It's a bit of an odd reaction for me since I'm used to being really excited when I'm this close to the start of a trip, but this one, as my first fully solo venture, is a bit unnerving. I think that's heightened by the fact that I slept TERRIBLY last night, and haven't allowed myself a nap this afternoon for fear that it will disrupt my ability to sleep on the plane. You see, due to the time difference my 9:10 P.M. flight will land in Iceland at just about 7:00 A.M. the next morning. Unfortunately that means that my best chance to quickly adapt to local time is to sleep for the duration of my 5 hour flight and then call that my night's sleep. That might be a tall order given that I won't be going into that flight at all rested. Something tells me that tomorrow is going to be a long and difficult day. If I can just get through it without napping in the afternoon I should be switched around to Iceland-time and ready to rock by the next day. Here's hoping.

I did a bit of research this afternoon that alleviated one of my concerns. I was under the impression that, it being summer, the sun wouldn't set in Iceland until VERY late at night. It turns out that by the end of August that trend is starting to swing around towards the shorted days, and that I'll be right in the middle where Iceland will be experiencing something close to what we would call a normal day-night cycle. What's interesting though is that when it shifts between always being light in the summer and always being dark in the winter it does so fairly dramatically. According to the chart that I was reading each day that I'm there the sun with rise roughly 3 minutes later, and set roughly 3 minutes soon. So every single day that I'm there will have about 6 minutes less daylight than the one before it. I thought that was pretty cool. The good news is that those sunsets are happening between 9:30-10:00 P.M. which should mean that I'll have no worried about sleeping in the daylight. Hooray!

Well, that's all for now. I imagine that the next time you'll hear from me (short of some posts on Twitter from my phone) I'll be in Iceland. Local time there is GMT, so I will be 4 hours ahead of everyone in Toronto, which should mean that by the time anyone here finishes work I should have had plenty of time to make a post. That's the theory anyway. Wish me luck!