One big drawback to international travel: jet lag

International travel is a great experience. The only real drawback, aside from the expense, is a little something known as jet lag.

Which is a particularly troublesome problem when you travel over nine time zones.

This is what happened to me in late May when I flew from Spokane to Madrid, Spain. I joined my wife there, she having spent the previous 10 days in Greece with her sister.

It wasn’t my first experience with the time difference. I’ve traveled a great deal in the past three decades, from China and India to Argentina and Brazil, Ireland and Russia to Morocco and South Africa – and several other countries in between.

But this time the transition seemed to hit me harder than ever. It took me a full week to adjust to my normal sleep pattern.

And that’s the problem, says the Mayo Clinic . “Jet lag occurs because your body’s internal clock is synced to your original time zone,” the clinic’s website proclaims. “The more time zones crossed, the more likely you are to experience jet lag.”

My flights went smoothly enough. I left Spokane at 3 p.m., arrived in Seattle in plenty of time to make my flight to Amsterdam. From there it was just a couple of more hours to Madrid, and I got there in time to eat dinner.

I didn’t sleep much that night. We’d planned to spend only the single night in Spain’s capital city. We’d checked it out some years before and were more interested this time in seeing three cities in the south: Córdoba, Granada and Sevilla. Plus, we wanted to spend a couple of days on the Costa del Sol .

After that, the plan was to fly to Lisbon, Portugal. But I’ll get to all that in future blog posts. First, I need to share some information that, if I had bothered to do some pre-trip research, might have helped me out. Or not.

Again, from the Mayo Clinic, tips to either avoid jet lag or at least reduce its effects:

Get plenty of rest before you fly. (Riiiight. Anxious about making sure that our house was prepared for our absence, I slept barely four hours the night before.)

Gradually adjust your schedule before you leave. (Good advice, but … fat chance.)

Properly time bright light exposure. (I’m not even sure what this means. Besides, our first few days in Spain were with rainy or overcast, so …)

Stay on your new schedule. (Check, but my body wasn’t fooled. It knew that I was trying to sleep at what it knew was the early afternoon.)

Stay hydrated. (Again, check. Which, of course, meant that I was rising from bed every couple of hours to, uh, use the facilities.)

Try to sleep on the plane if it’s nighttime at your destination. (I can nap fitfully on a plane. But to get some actual restful sleep? Please.)

And that’s it. Given everything, maybe I didn’t really need to know all this before I left. Not much was going to help.

Well, it wasn’t going to help me, anyway. Maybe, though, it can do something for you.

Next up : The wonders of Córdoba.