Five hours left

It's the middle of the night in Minsk as I write this and I am flying across the USA. I chose my seat on the airline's web site thinking I'd enjoy the view from my window seat just behind the wing. Unfortunately the diagram misled me and my view is basically a wing. I am very bored but don't want to sleep again until San Francisco so that I'll be tired enough to sleep the whole night.

We land in five more hours, which will be 26 hours after a taxi picked me up at home in Minsk. I'm grateful that Nika will pick me up at the airport because I don't imagine I'll have much left. I wonder how much more it would have cost to but an itinerary that took me near the north pole.  In hindsight, the shorter trip would have been really attractive.