Zoned Out Of Time

We have always been quite cognizant of the various time zones not just across the US but all over the world as it was thrust upon us by the nature of our jobs. It was a matter of utmost necessity to know which time zone each attendee was going to be in while trying to schedule conference calls with attendees located across Los Angeles, New Jersey, London, Bangalore and Singapore for example, and find that one single time slot that would work for everyone’s schedule. Biannual changes due to daylight savings would kick the complexity up a notch but we were able to stay on top of it most of the time. Things got insane when the US decided to effect their daylight savings changes a week or two ahead of the European change and that brought untold misery in trying to reschedule recurring calls of the aforementioned attendee spread since it threw everyone out of sync primarily because our outlook servers which managed our calendars were located in the US and hence changed time before we actually did. Anyway, the point of this all was to establish that we have a pretty good command over the concept of time zones in general. Now on to our story…

During the road trip, we were prepared for the change of time zones that we would encounter when driving across the country and were conditioned to anticipate a longer drive than what was predicted by the GPS’s “time of arrival” ticker when traveling west across a time zone and shorter when traveling east. It was a simple matter of knowing which states lay in what time zone, not that it really mattered to us at all whether we arrived somewhere an hour late or a day early. Regardless of our comfort level, we were firstly surprised to find that around a dozen states are fully or partially in the Mountain Time Zone (GMT -7 hours) when only 4 states are in the Pacific Time Zone (GMT -8 hours) especially since Mountain is one of the most underplayed time zones. Lesson learned. It was all very simple really, given our rock solid conditioning across worldwide time zone sensitization. Unfortunately that was to be until we had to reckon with the state of Arizona. It was when we were driving to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas through Utah when we got stumped for the first time – going from Nevada (Pacific time) to Arizona, we expected a time change since Arizona is in the mountain time zone but strangely, the GPS did not factor that into its calculation. We did not think too much of it since it was a day trip to Arizona through Utah and we would return to Nevada anyway hence it was easier to call the GPS stupid and just let it go.

Next, we were headed from New Mexico to Flagstaff (AZ) for a couple of days that would allow us to visit the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and to visit Meteor Crater. The GPS indicated that our drive time to Flagstaff from Santa Fe would be a mere 4.5 hours (based on the time of arrival ticker) and knowing that the distance to be traveled was around 400 miles; we were stumped now for a second time. Allow me to explain why. The time zone map that we were using clearly showed both New Mexico and Arizona being in the same time zone hence it was a near impossible feat to drive the said distance in the given time for the speed limit observing citizen that Judith is. It was just easier to conclude that Flagstaff, by some strange contortion of time and space was probably in the Pacific Time Zone and not in the Mountain Time Zone after all and continue on with our drive. It was not until we got to Flagstaff and Googled this anomaly that we found the answer – while all of Arizona is in the Mountain Time Zone, most of the state (except the Navajo region) does not observe Daylight Savings Time!!

Without another word, we opened a bottle of wine and raised our glasses in a solemn toast to the state of Arizona for being able to get the better of us through its utter simplistic observance of its time zone. It did make me wonder if Pink Floyd had undergone a somewhat similar encounter that resulted in them writing the song Time and especially the line “So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking”.

PS: It has been hard to keep the blog updated especially since we are almost at the end of our journey and with just a week left on the road, we have been desperately trying to savor each and every moment of it. In the meantime, we have walked among the ancient Redwoods of California, driven along the beautiful Pacific Cost on Hwy 1, toured the wine country in California (we prefer Paso Robles over Napa), driven through Death Valley, visited both sides of the Grand Canyon, attended a magnificent Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas, amazed at the striking grandeur of the natural wonders in Utah (Zion, Arches, Canyonlands), had a strange ghostly encounter at the Stanley Hotel in the gorgeous Colorado Rockies and fell in love with the Pueblo architecture of New Mexico. Here are some photos from the last month on the road. By the way, in case you are interested, there are 6 time zones used among the various states and a couple more for the territories.