Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 8th of May.

I am at a very noisy Heathrow Airport. I'm here because I've just come to meet Douglas Bolton, friend of the podcast,

who you would have heard me talking about all manner of things to do with

America and photography. Doug Bolton, you have just flown in from Denver, a journey of

5,000 miles in economy. How are you feeling? I feel fine at the moment. I think, you know,

having flown back on British Airways A350, which is a nice modern plane,

they sort of set the lighting and do all these moods so you sort of get used to how the time of the day,

by setting the mood lighting, yeah, no, I'm feeling fine at the moment.

A flight like that from Denver, Colorado, eight-hour journey, and that was actually pretty fast, thanks to the jet stream, it's impossible, isn't it?

Because it takes off kind of mid-evening from Denver and then you suddenly find that you're at Heathrow and it's kind of 10 o'clock in the morning.

I'm just really interested how you spend your time on the flight whether you can sleep and what your

secret there is. So normally my secret when I'm coming back, when I go in eastbound, obviously from the

US back to Europe, I would try and watch a movie, try and stay awake as much as I could just because

you try and get into the body clock of the UK and then when I land in the

UK try and stay up as much as I can here when I arrive. But here we are. We're talking,

well, it's 11 o'clock in the morning. You've been on the ground for about an hour. And so you're

planning to stay up for what? Another 10, 11 hours? Yes, because the amount of times I've gone back home and, you know, I've walked in the door, I've seen the sofa and I've just sat on the sofa and that's the worst thing you can do because you'll just instantly fall asleep. So I try and keep myself occupied and try and, you know, just stay awake, basically. So if I can make it to at least 9pm, then I should be fine. What, so you'll go to sleep, say, at 9pm and then, what, wake up at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning, you just think, oh, I've all adjusted to work that quick? I wish it was. No, unfortunately, if I go to bed at 9, I'll be awake again at 2, 3 in the morning. And morning, and then you'll go through this patch of being

really tired and then you'll wake up and it'll be 11 a.m. So it does take a couple of days to get

used to it. And going in the other direction, going west, where it's basically just a long

daytime flight, takes longer because you're going against the prevailing

jet stream, typically up to 10 hours. How do you cope with that? Do you have any secrets there?

Day trip is great. I usually watch lots of movies and catch up with a bit of work on the flight

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