Odyssey

Only when working for the government would you travel 21 time zones west to get to a point 3 times zones to your east. Our diplomats really need to get to work on China so we can fly over that country. If we could have overflown China, we'd have gotten home a day and a half earlier and felt much better on arrival. Instead, we flew from Afghanistan to Kyrgyzstan, spent a night there and then continued to Germany, Alaska and Okinawa. Upon arrival in Okinawa we dropped off some of our sister teams, spent a few hours at a reception and then resumed our journey. From Okinawa it was still nearly a day's trip to get back to Hawaii, stopping in Tokyo. On the plus side, it is always nice to intermingle with the Japanese, however superficial our interaction with them may have been on our short stay. And fortunately the plane was mostly empty so plenty of room to move about, although this fact is part of why we had to fly so far (We didn't have enough of our own pax to charter a flight to go exactly where we wanted in the fastest possible way.).

In all, we spent nearly 40 hours in the air between Afghanistan and Hawaii and traveled across 26 time zones.