One of the first things we were told upon boarding the ship was to turn our phones to airplane mode. Really? We paid for Internet access!

The next thing we were told was to log into the ship’s proprietary internet service, which – for reasons I still have yet to understand – works fine, even with airplane mode on.

Alas, lots of things we’ve come to expect do not work fine. Text, for example. And phone calls. 

And the phone’s display of the correct time.

I’m one of those who stopped wearing a watch years ago, choosing instead to rely on my phone for the time. Always available. Always convenient. And always absolutely on time.

Unless it’s in airplane mode. My phone’s time still changes every minute, but it’s always the minute in Los Angeles, which is where I was when I turned on airplane mode.

Fast forward a day, when Daylight Savings Time ended. Suddenly, my phone was wrong. A few days after that we crossed some kind of time zone (yes, there are time zones even when land is thousands of miles away) and gained another hour. We were sailing west.

We gained another hour when we arrived in Hawaii. A few days after that, another hour, and so on until Wednesday the 13th, when we will cross the International Date Line and lose an entire day.

Soon after that we’ll turn around. We’ll get our day back and lose all those hours we gained.

Eventually we will return to LA and my phone will again display microsecond accuracy. Until then, to tell the truth, we’re simply not paying much attention to the time. 

And that may be the best part of this entire journey: a vacation from time.

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