cmezapdx

I"m currently living in Oregon, and have always wanted to travel to europe. I know that there is an 8 hour difference, so i am wondering how hard it is to adjust to the time zone? Is it difficult to sleep for the first few weeks? Do travelers get fatigue or Jetlag? If it is difficult, what is the best way to over come this issue. Please share your thoughts, I would truely appreciate it.

Thanks,

Chris.

Robert2533

Actually, it's 9 hours difference between Oregon and Europe, 8 hours between where you are and the UK., but nothing to worry about, millions do it every year. Just get a good nights sleep the first night and you will be fine the next morning.

greg

Look at the time zone map: http://www.worldtimezone.com/. The time difference is either 8 hours (UK, Ireland), 9 hours (France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc), or 10 hours (Greece, Finland, etc). It is either difficult to go to sleep or stay awake depending on how you frame the issue. How one deals with depends on how easily one can go to sleep.

Most flights from the US arrive in the morning in Europe. To be specific, say you take Delta 178 leaving PDX at 1:30pm, arriving in AMS (Amsterdam) at 8:30am. Now what you got. You are arriving in AMS at 11:30pm the PDX time. But your body says it is late at night, what are you going to do?

While you cannot check-in hotel so early unless you paid extra, for this example, suppose you can check-in. Arriving 8:30am means you might be at your hotel at 10am AMS time, which is 1am PDX time.

For those who can always sleep even after taking a nap might sleep 10am-3pm AMS time, stay up 3pm-10pm, go to sleep at 10pm and synch to the local time by next morning.

For those who cannot sleep after taking a few hours nap, if they sleep 10am-3pm, then they probably may not fall sleep until ~2-4am AMS time and will take days to synch to the local time. In this case, force themselves to stay up until about 8pm AMS time (11am PDX time, that is as they have pulled an all-nighter). They will be so exhausted at 8pm AMS time and will easily sleep until 7am or so. When they wake up next morning, they are synched to the local time.

hetismij2

Everyone handles it differently but when I return from the west coast of the US to the Netherlands I try to stay awake on my return day. I take it very easy, but I eat lunch at lunchtime, and a light meal early evening. I then go to bed early and generally am fine the following morning.
The one time I slept in the afternoon after arriving in the morning I had problems for days.

bendigo

On our recent trip we faced an 11 hour difference after our 25 hours of travel from east coast Australia to London. We arrived at 6 pm, got to our apartment by 9:30. Ate and went to bed, then got up in the morning and got on with it - we were in London - how could sleep possibly be better than that??
The return journey was harder - arrived at 2.30 am on Christmas Eve after the flight from Rome, but kept going that day, then Christmas Day - and then we slowed down!
(Our 16 yo son went to his part-time-job at 5.00pm on Christmas Eve - mostly because he wanted to show how tough he is!)

flanneruk

There's no one answer to this - even for an individual.

Many find the problem very serious: others hardly notice, others find it's different each time. Many find eastbound creates more problems than westbound. My method for eastbound, bearing in mid most flights leave the West Coast in mid to late afternoon and arrive in Europe around midday:

- Get up as early as possible on departure day, and do as much physical activity as possible
- At the airport, eat as many carbohydrates as possible, with a modest amount of wine (meatloaf and mashed potatoes, if available, is close to perfect, but lots of pasta works too)
- Get a window seat, or the middle of the middle column of seats in a two-aisle plane. That way you won't be woken up when a neighbour goes to the toilet.
- On the plane, have a glass of wine and accept the meal if you're still awake - though with luck you should have slipped off to sleep by now. Now go to sleep.
- On arrival stay active till an early night, but don't go to sleep before 9 pm. Don't under any circumstances drive that day (in fact if you're even thinking about it, stay at home and kill a fellow citizen). Don't plan any tourist activity involving mental agility or concentration. Don't accept any social or business invitations that day, unless you really want to fall off to sleep into your neighbour's soup plate. As much light, external, activity as possible.

rhon

We also travel from Australia, so we are talking 21+ hours on a plane- for us it is 30 hours from walking out our front door to landing in Europe. Who knows what our time should be ?? We arrived in Paris at 6.30am, arrived at our apartment [ fortunately we could get in early ]about 8.30. A shower, a cuppa and we almost felt human and stayed up all day, light dinner and early night. No problems.

Flanner, we had a problem with a window seat. The person on the aisle put their table down, a pillow on top and went to sleep. [Lucky them!!!] We were then trapped for ages. Fortunately only a five hour flight, but we are a bit wary of window seats on long flights.

But, everyone is different . What suits us might not suit you and you should do what feels right for you at the time. But weeks to get over it? I would not think so.

Go for it and have a great trip.

flanneruk

1. "We were then trapped for ages. Fortunately only a five hour flight"
Unless you're got a real prostate problem, just make sure you pee before going to sleep. The good traveller goes when he can, not when he needs to.

2. There is an altogether different option.
Especially from Oregon - which has rotten connections to Abroad - it's worth looking at getting a late-night redeye to one of the East Coast airports with daytime transatlantic flights (usually: Toronto, Boston, Chicago, JFK, Newark and Dulles). You start packing after work, go to a relatively nearby airport and embark quite close to bedtime, when it's usually easy to get a few hours' sleep. You arrive around dawn and transfer to the Europe bound plane (actually: most often London bound, and I think this only works at all for London, Paris and Frankfurt) around 9 am EST, feeling groggy.

It's then easy (in fact virtually guaranteed) to drowse off for another few hours. You arrive in Europe around 9 or 10 pm local time, go straight to your hotel, have something close to a decent night's sleep, then wake up feeling close to normal. You've written off just one day: the direct flights from LA, San Francisco, Seattle or Vancouver really write off close to two.

Though it's messy to do this if you're starting off in LA, from places like Las Vegas or Portland it's no different really from flying to a west coast intercontinental airport for your onward connection: just more efficient.

Often cheaper, too, since you might have more airlines to choose from.

DaveJJ

For the last few years my wife and I have been using melatonin to overcome jetlag when travelling to Europe. We start taking it at 2:00 pm two days before we are to travel. Upon arrival in Europe we take it at the same equivalent time (7:00 pm in London, 8:00 pm Greece). We continue taking it until we are adjusted to the new time zone, usually within 2 days.

No matter how tired we may be upon arrival in Europe we don't take a nap as this has in the past greatly affected our ability to sleep that night. We will drop our bags off at our hotel and then head out for a walk about and something to eat. We try to stay awake until our normal bedtime.

cmezapdx

Thank all of you for the reply. This was also an assignment for one of my hospitality courses in college, so the answers were fast and great. Dave JJ, I have heard of taking meatonin for jetlag as well. Sometimes when I travel to Mexico i'm stuck in one of the Texas airport's for about 4 hrs, so it's hard to adjust; next time I will try your remedy.

bendigo

If you're only travelling North / south with no significant East / West or West / East movement it is not jet-lag that you would be suffering from in Texas. That is just boredom and fatigue from sitting around aimlessly.
Best solution to this is a snooze, finding some interesting shopping or reading to do, or perching on a comfortable seat in a bar - all of which will make time fly!