Since the flight crossed the International Date Line, we left Houston on a Wednesday night and arrived in Auckland, New Zealand on a Friday morning. So Day #2 was getting from point A to point B. We had a pretty good plan (we thought) to minimize the effects of jet lag. We’ll find out if it helps/works. The plan was to get on the plane at 7, depart at 8, eat dinner around 9-9:30 and then put the plan into place. We thought that if we could getting really tired before we tried to go to sleep, we’d sleep better on the plane and if we waited as long as possible before going to sleep, we’d be awake a shorter amount of time on Friday.

Here’s the plan…eat dinner on the plane (not exciting.- surprise!), then watch two movies and then try to go to sleep. Pushing the numbers, the total flight is 14 hours long, dinner + two movies  = 6 hours + 6 hours of (attended) sleep + breakfast service on the plane = 14 hours. So we ran the plan. When it was time to sleep, I reclined my seat, moved my bag under my knees and pushed my legs as far under the seat as possible. Holly and Heather tried out the ‘bed’ feature of the seats – an extra button on the armrest which brought up another section of seat where legs would normally be. (I fill up all available space behind and under seats, so I didn’t participate. After trying several configurations, they removed the extra seat sections and we all went to sleep (Heather at the window, Holly in the middle and me on the aisle). Six hours later, we have succeeded in sleeping 3-4 hours each, ate our breakfast and got off the plane in Auckland.