DURING this past "day" I had dinner with my mum and dad in Melbourne, breakfast in the Middle Eastern city of Abu Dhabi, and a late lunch in London.
I caught an Ethiad flight to London Heathrow, via the Emirates city of Abu Dhabi, at 11pm on Sunday and arrived in the English city at noon on Monday for a 20-day travel-writing trip that will also take me to Oxford and Bath and then up to bonnie Scotland.
International air travel is always such a surreal experience for me, and while I have probably done a couple of dozen continent-hopping flights since my first overseas trip in 1994 I never cease to be amazed by the time-versus-distance aspect of long-haul journeys.
At lunchtime yesterday I was dashing through Sunbury Square to buy bread rolls, today I was navigating the underground corridors that radiate from South Kensington station looking for the stairs that would take me up to the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Like I said, surreal.
It took me 28 hours to get from my house in Sunbury to my hotel in Mayfair so by "day" I mean the collection of minutes my body sorted into the basic categories of evening, night, morning and afternoon as I zoomed across the handful of time zones that sit to the west of Australia.
My most surreal trip happened last May when I flew from Australia to Argentina and in one day - one very long day, thanks to a hop across the International Date Line - stood in four different countries during the journey with stops in New Zealand and Chile.
After leaving Abu Dhabi today the captain followed a course across the Iraq and, as we flew over towns I know so well from the news, I could see the magnificent long line of snow-capped mountains (below) that sit on the war-torn nation's eastern edge.
The last time I flew from the UAE to the UK, back when a Republican was in the White House, the plane went right around the country that was then at war with George W looking for those pesky weapons of mass destruction.
