There’s never a perfect time to leave England, but the day after a trip to the Greenwich Observatory may be as good a time as any.

Visiting this place taught me about the struggle to calculate longitude, made me think about time and time-keeping, about journeys great and small.

At one point yesterday, I had one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one foot in the western. Traveling allows for such straddling, for slipping out of one life and inhabiting another.

Today we’ll be in one hemisphere only. And today, all being well, we will be home.