World Cruise - What Happened To February 17?

We sat down the other day and went over our cruise itinerary again to decide on the smaller excursions we may want to take along the way. To help me visualize our trip, I took my wall calendar and began penciling in the ports and cruise days (days at sea). Everything was going along well until I got to February 17. There was no February 17 on our cruise itinerary!

Instead of February 17 there was a note that we cross the Dateline. Now we've done that lots of times before but never on a ship. It's a first!!

Every time we have crossed the Dateline it has been on an airplane and doesn't seem quite as jarring. Maybe it's because of the jet lag. Their will be no jet lag on this trip. That was one of the inviting details of this trip. We gain an hour through each time zone from Miami through the Canal and across the Pacific until we hit the dateline. Then we lose a day, February 17, but as we continue around the globe, we will gain those 24 hours back one hour at a time.

So I guess, in the end, we still have February 17. It's just that it is chopped up into twenty-four hour pieces and dispersed through the remaining seventy-five days of our trip. I'm  just glad my birthday isn't on the 17th of February!

The Circadian Clock - A Traveler's Curse?

Reading through some helpful articles on jet lag I ran across a reference to the discovery of a gene that regulates the adaptation of the body to a new time zone. If scientists can discover how it works and how to get around it, they may be able to come up with a medication to eradicate or at least improve the effects of jet lag. It all involves something called the circadian clock. Huh?

The circadian clock is a 24 hour cycle that tells us when to wake or to sleep. Most life forms operate by it. When I read that, I thought about migrating birds. Maybe that's why they always go north-south. There's no time change involved there.

The internal clock responds to light and when we cross several time zones in a hurry as we do when we fly by plane, the clock gets out of whack. To quote the article in Business Insider, "The circadian clock is governed by an area of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN), which in turn receives information from a specialised system in the eyes which detects environmental light, according to the report in the journal Cell."

The scientists were able to tinker with some of the genes in mice that respond to light and one in particular that would reset the circadian clock. The mice responded well when the scientists blocked the one gene. Much more research is needed of course but I'll bet those mice will be much less jet lagged than the rest of us.