en route to rome

march 20, 2013.

Time in NJ: 12:46 am
En route to Rome: 5:46 am

Almost six hours into the flight.

I haven't fallen asleep at all since the flight began. I've tried, but I really haven't gotten much success. I think that it's just my mind being too incredibly excited about travel to just relax. It's a lot of things at once... Italy, Rome, Music, etc. I'm wide awake.

And I suppose for good reason too. As I write this, the passengers I'm sitting next to are all afst asleep, but I'm writing with a solitary light above me. I've got the GPS and flight details pulled up on my screen, and if I'm honest, I really could read these things for hours.

I am truly fascinated by this machine. In the few rather long hours since we left Philadelphia airport, we've traveled close to 3500 miles, at a speed of approximately Mach 0.8, or 550 miles per hour. On my plane to Beijing, we were going about 662 miles per hour. The light from the sun moves around Earth at 600.

Amazing.

The concept of the plane itself is only almost a century old. With extremely humble beginnings as a modest contraption only capable of brief flings in the backyard of the Wright brothers, it has come a very long way.

How blessed is man that God grants the wisdom to create such masterpieces?

Which has also got me thinking about how blessed I am to be going on this trip. As the man sitting next to me spoke earlier, "A third of people in the world involved in music will be able to go to these locations. Even fewer of them will have the chance to visit the historic musical monuments that we will be visiting. And even fewer will have the opportunity to perform there."

Approaching Europe's costs soon. It's 3:40 am in the timezone we are currently in. We'll land in Rome at around 8 am there. 2 hours left!

I'm not really sure what it is that I'm goign to take home for everyone. I have a pretty long list and not a lot of space. I've thought about taking rocks back... xD