Nearly 14 and a half hours on an airplane can be quite an intimidating prospect. It is the longest flight that I have ever taken in my life and I can’t imagine a longer one in my future. The flight itself turned out to be both surprisingly easy and surprisingly challenging at the same time.

The most obvious challenge on a flight that leaves at 11 P.M. is sleeping. Airplanes are not comfortable places to sleep. Despite this, I was able to get at least six hours of solid sleep. However, I spent much of the flight in and out of sleep and a good part of the second half of the flight trying to force myself to sleep.

I was trying to avoid jet lag. Sydney, Australia is 17 hours ahead of Los Angeles. It actually ends up feeling more like going back 7 hours and just losing a day. The flight departed on a Thursday evening and landed in the morning on a Saturday. Friday just didn’t exist! Understanding that 7 A.M. in Sydney is 2 P.M. in L.A., and that without any kind of adjustment my Saturday in Sydney would be short (I’d likely get sleepy at 4 P.M., which is 11 P.M. in L.A.), I came up with a plan.

First, I forced myself to stay up a couple of hours after boarding. This was relatively easy as the flight provided dinner service. Then I tried to force myself to sleep as much as possible. A little over halfway through the flight, it became harder to sleep in the unnatural position of an airplane seat.

This was the most difficult part of the flight, as is often the case, but it was not nearly as difficult as I had thought it would be. Maybe this is a sign that our lives are too sedentary. Being seated for 14 hours in a row is obviously not natural. However, many of us have had days with similar amounts of time spent seated. Ten hours at a desk job, with an hour and a half of commuting and some time at home in front of a computer or television at home has created a surprising number of similar days. I have somewhat different reasons for having had days like this, but the 14+ hours of sitting on an airplane felt almost disturbingly too natural to me.

The sun rose right as the flight was preparing to land. It left me with one question. Why did I just leave summer to visit winter? In Sydney, on Saturday, I would last until just after 9 P.M. before falling asleep. Not bad. Maybe long flights to the other side of the world are far more manageable than we all think, and we all should take advantage of opportunities to visit “The Land Down Under.”