Mrs. Webb goes to India part 2, or when NOT to take Ambien

The first part of my trip was pretty smooth. My nonstop flight turned out not to be nonstop though. It was really a non-change-planes flight, but we stopped and I did have to get out. Bummer! My original thought was stay up late, get on the plane to Chicago and take an Ambien then to help reset my clock to the right time. Except then I found out that I couldn't just sleep through the 2 hours at O'Hare, so I had to regroup.

I read and chatted with a number of people about the best jet lag prevention options. There are the diehards who say "Just stay up until it's the right time there". That didn't seem realistic to me, since India is 12.5 hours off of US Mountain Time, and I know from graduate school that if I stay up long enough, I will in fact fall asleep with my eyes open, including dreaming. Now, dreaming with eyes closed is one thing. Dreaming with eyes open is a shade too close to hallucinating for my taste. I try to avoid repeating the experiment in which I told Jayson about the flying monkeys and sang the Wizard of Oz theme in a feathery, creepy other worldish voice (he wisely stopped trying to make me stay awake after that...).

So the "just stay up" method was out. Another method is to start taking melatonin at the time you want to be going to sleep at the new place, several days in advance. Really, this seemed promising to me, but with all the confusion around the holidays, I just forgot. Oh well, I'll try it next time.

The third option was to take Ambien. My parents swear by it for trips to Europe. Get on the plane, have dinner, pop an Ambien, wake up in the new place and then push through the day and go to bed on their time. I was pretty sure this could work, but I couldn't quite figure out the timing. The travel time for the trip broke down like this:
9 am: Leave Denver for Chicago
2 hour flight
2 hour layover
8 hour flight to Frankfurt
5 hour layover
10 hour flight to Hyderabad.

In there, the time zones were all over the place, so I kept thinking "how would I know when it was when I wanted to sleep in India?" So I hit on a midway solution. I decided to sleep as little as possible the night before I left, pushing my clock forward with sleep deprivation. Then pop the Ambien out of the gate at Denver and viola, clock reset.

I stayed up until 2 am, cat napped to 4:15, got up and headed to the airport. But of course, the original plan was blown, since I couldn't stay on the plane in Chicago. Then when I got to Chicago, I was upgraded to Business class for reasons I still haven't figured out but I sure wasn't complaining. I decided to stay up for at least part of that--after all, there was a yummy 3 course dinner, with prosciutto, shrimp, St Andre triple cream (Yeah Baby!) cheese, fruit, salmon with a dill sauce and pilaf, and a tasty cheese tray with port.

After all the yummies, I thought I'd finally call it a day, but realizing that the flight was now over within 6 hours, and I had had 2 hours of sleep the night before, I thought maybe I could/should skip the Ambien. I'd only ever taken Ambien once, and that was the tester the week before to confirm that I wasn't going to have any side effects.

I popped on myBose noise cancelling headphones. These things ROCK. They were a gift from Jayson for Christmas and they made the trip so much nicer. Especially since there were a lot of squirmy upset kids on the planes. Unfortunately, the pitch of "baby crying" just pretty much pierces through that veil of noiselessness. I'm not sure if it's the tone itself, or if having nursed twins, my brain is premanently warped to that sound.

I *thought* I only drifted a bit and finally decided "this isn't working, I'll take that Ambien now after". Turns out I drifted for longer than I realized, and popped an Ambien 3 hours before we landed in Frankfurt. And of course, they turn the lights back on before you land to give you breakfast, which I'm pretty sure I didn't have, but can't be certain about that.

I stumbled off the plane, and found myself in a strange terminal in Frankfurt with 5 hours to kill and an insane urge to just lie down in the middle of the concourse and go back to sleep. I finally did find some empty seats at the gate I was going to fly out of and just sagged sideways and fell asleep for a few hours.

I took some pictures in the airport there. Here's a few strange things to note: those exit signs. Apparently in Germany, you don't just put an exit sign. If you want to leave the building, you better be planning to do it fast! Second, the view out the window is the view from the gate I was at. Traffic comes to what looks like the very edge of the terminal. The plane was directly below that window. Added to the surreal quality of the experience.