Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Assignment NOLA:
Shedding light on my travel ignorance

hibiscus026

Dew covers a hibiscus flower outside my Melbourne, Fla., home on Wednesday morning, just before I left for New Orleans.


As the sun rose on Central Florida this morning, it dawned on me that I would be crossing into a different time zone on my trip to New Orleans. As a result, I would gain an hour.

That's not too significant for most, but for me, it will be the first time I've subtracted an hour from my watch (save the daylight-saving time). I've been into Canada and the Atlantic standard time zone on plenty of occasions, so I'm used to adding an hour.

I guess it's ironic that, for this trip across the line, I'm going to witness a culture similar to certain aspects of the French Canadian one I saw back home in Maine, especially in the music.

The greatest significance of the time change (though I can't capitalize on it now), however, is that I didn't have to get up so early this morning. I'm a night copy editor, so I'm used to going to bed at 4 or 5 a.m. and rolling back out around noontime. Setting the alarm clock last night was a rare occasion. And it's too bad I didn't realize the time difference until this morning: I could have gotten an hour more of sleep.

But some things are just worth waking up for. This is one of them.

I'm off to New Orleans, after I pack a sandwich for the road.

Assignment NOLA home page

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