Jet lag was not significant to me in my youth.
Now that I’m a bit more mature Jet Lag is all too real.
On our trip to Greece 2021 we booked two weeks in the Wyndham Attica Dolce. It was good that we did plan that as a minimum. We flew from our home in Northern Nevada through Chicago and on to Athens with no pause other than the time of travel. This is a ten hour time change.
We tried to stay up when we arrived to more quickly shift to the local time zone. Our biological clocks, were not to be fooled. We found ourselves sleeping all day and up at night for a full week as we slowly adjusted. It was good that we had booked two weeks as the first week was a ”bust” from a tourism perspective. Our touring on this trip thus was accomplished during the second week as we endeavored to take in the Temple of Poseidon at Sunoun, the Temple and Museum of Artemis at Vavrona, the remains of Agamemnon’s Palace at Mycenae and other bronze age and classical age sites.
Following our 2021 trip we reflected carefully on our 2021 trip to Attica experience, as we planned our 2022 visit to Greece. Our key lesson learned was we needed to be gentler on ourselves. To address this we added two key features for the 2022 trip. First we added more time in country (four weeks not just two) to be sure we had time to recover from jet-lag, and maximize our touring experiences. The second feature we added was an “in route travel pause” in Pennsylvania where our daughter had moved with her new husband. This pause gave us 3 days at the beginning of the trip allowing us to adjust to three hours of the 10 hour time change before we ever left the U.S.A.. We then had the nearly 10 hour direct flight to get to Athens, Greece from Philadelphia; combined with an overnight stay near the Athens airport; followed by a late afternoon flight the next day to the island of Crete. When we arrived, we went to bed early. Thus by the time we awoke on Crete we had allowed for nearly five days of time (assuming 1 hr/day) or half of the ten hour time change.
We were on Crete for seven days so we limited our activities the first day enabling us to start our more active touring after adjusting to six hours of the ten hour change and thus minimizing our sleep deficit.
This approach, planning a couple of stops along the way and spreading the travel over several days made the trip so much less stressful and so much more enjoyable for Judy and Dirk, the ”Soulmates” of Soulmatestraveling.com. While we realize many folks may not have the time available for such a solution in todays fast paced hectic society, if you can afford even some of this approach, e.g. be kind to yourself, it will help you enjoy the trip.