Red-Eye Route

Because of the two-hour time difference, it's hard to have a same-day flight from the West coast back to Kansas City toward the end of the day.  As a rule of thumb, if you can't be on the plane by 4pm, you can't make it back the same day.  Our meetings ended today at about 4:30, so there was no way I could get on a plane and end up in KC tonight.  So I had two options: Wait until the morning and take a flight back, which would take most of the day, or take a red-eye tonight and fly through the night and eventually end up in KC tomorrow.  I chose the latter.  Our meetings were in San Francisco, and the first flight out of SFO was at around midnight.  I noticed there were flights out of LA that also left at around midnight.  They both had similar options for connections back to Kansas City (no direct flights either way).  Since I'm more likely to get frequent flier status based on flight segments, I decided to take a short flight to LA, and then take the midnight-ish flight from there, which gets me an extra segment without delaying my trip.  I also decided to take the longest possible flight from LA to allow me time to sleep. So here I am in LA (which I don't love, despite the sign), shortly before "getting ready for bed" (taking out my contacts and brushing my teeth) and boarding my 11:55pm to Atlanta.  It's a four-hour flight, and then I'll fly two hours back to KC, arriving at 9:30am.  I'll get six hours of sleep (I have a window seat both ways), allowing me to be reasonably refreshed and ready for the day when I land tomorrow morning in Kansas City.