traveling again

On the overnight flight from Gone West to Amsterdam, hours and hours in which the light never quite went away because the plane flew up over the Arctic Circle, I couldn't sleep. I don't know if it was for excitement or because the flight left Gone West at 1:30 pm. Who can sleep then?

As the flight tracker showed us beginning to descend over southern England, down over the English Channel toward Schipol Airport, I started counting to myself how many times I've flown into Amsterdam since 2000, when I first went back to Europe and Africa. 

How many times have I watched that flight tracker cross the English Channel? 9 or 10, I think. The 10th flight over the Atlantic might have been to Brussels instead, and the 11th to London, unless those were numbers 11 and 12. 

Schipol was the same shiny, bright place it's always been, with the yellow signs overhead. I had just enough time to go through immigration into the EU and back through security and to find a bathroom that didn't have a line all the way down the hall, and then I had to board my next plane. 

On that flight, I slept. 

There were no seat-back screens on this flight. Nothing to tell me where we were or when we would arrive, so I leaned against the window and dozed my way across Europe.

When I walked out of the "Nothing to Declare" door in Barcelona, J. was waiting with a sign that had my name, a picture of Barcelona, and the word "Bienvenidos" on it. (For any one who happens to be totally Spanish-less, that means welcome.)

Jet lag is a strange thing. I managed to stay awake until 11 pm Barcelona time, which was 2 pm in Gone West. By then I'd been awake for 32 hours, not counting the naps on the planes. We'd walked all across Barcelona, through the warren of narrow little streets full of tourists, past the markets and boulevards that everyone sees, and down along the waterfront, where we found a restaurant to sit protected by glass and eat thick-cut papas bravas next to the sand.

"I'm fine as long as it's light," I said at one point, "but even when we go into a street that doesn't have sunlight, I can feel myself fading." 

"You're a little loopy," J. said, as it got dark, as I blindly followed him across intersections and through alleys. 

I was quite loopy.

But I slept for 11 hours, and when I woke up, the air was warm and the sun was bright over Barcelona, and I was traveling again.