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fly into sunset

8:00 AM → 8:00 PM. Twelve hours, right?

Wrong.

It’s actually 21 hours, given the nine-hour time difference between Paris and Portland. Twenty-one hours, and it never got dark.

We awakened at eight o’clock on a sunny Parisian morning. Cleaned the (rented) apartment, packed our bags, took a cab to the airport, checked in, and boarded our 2:00 afternoon flight to Portland.

We touched down in Portland at 8:00 PM just as it was getting dark. In fact, it was the first darkness we’d seen since Paris, twenty-one hours ago. Daylight all the way.

That’s what happens when you fly west at 600 miles an hour. Just as the sun moves west across the Earth, so did we. I didn’t sleep at all, but after collecting our bags and taking the train from the airport, we arrived at home precisely at bedtime.

We’re home. It’s raining in Portland, of course, but we’re taking a day off to unpack and catnap, so we don’t care. We’re scouring the Internet for a Paris apartment for next year and that’s the primary reason why we’re not heartsick about leaving the City of Light:

We’re going back.

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