Milan Hejduk has lived through it before, but that doesn't make it any easier.

Last Sunday, the 32-year-old Avalanche forward and his teammates took off on another NHL trip, another mammoth excursion across multiple time zones en route to four games in seven nights.

The games are the fun part, the big rush at the end of a long day. It's the mind games and endless miles that tax bodies and spirits and turn otherwise pleasant players into grumpy young men.

After a while, even routine trips in the West become a blur of bus rides, wake-up calls, blizzards and that physical fog known as jet lag.

"Sometimes, you forget your room number; sometimes, you forget what floor you're on," Hejduk said. "And, yeah, sometimes (the city)."

The skies might seem friendlier in the Eastern Conference, where traveling is a comparative vacation - even with the new scheduling format that calls for at least one game against each of the 15 Western Conference teams.

The Avalanche will log about 53,000 miles this season - the most in the NHL, according to Avalanche vice president Jean Martineau.

The New York Rangers, meanwhile, will travel less than 34,000 miles and are able to take quick bus trips to at least three of four conference rivals.

More Rangers players probably live closer to the Meadowlands in New Jersey or Nassau Coliseum on Long Island than Madison Square Garden.

In fact, all 15 Eastern Conference teams are located in the Eastern time zone, while Western clubs are spread over four time zones. The Northwest Division alone covers three: Minnesota (Central), Calgary, Colorado, Edmonton (Mountain) and Vancouver (Pacific).

No rest in West

The discrepancy in travel starts on Day One. The Islanders played their first road game of the season at the Meadowlands, a half-hour's drive for many players. It took the Avs that long to drive to Denver International Airport, the takeoff point for their road opener in Edmonton.

The Dallas Stars probably weren't impressed - the distance between Big D and Edmonton is about 1,700 miles, which is roughly the distance between Dallas and Managua, Nicaragua.

"You don't get nearly as much sleep in the West," said backup goalie Andrew Raycroft, one of the few Avs who has played in the East. "It's not like you're a zombie all day. But it's a little harder when you wake up.

"Most flights in the East are an hour, an hour-and-a-half. If you go to Florida, it takes a couple hours. You're not getting home at 3 in the morning like here."

Not that Colorado players are complaining. They stay in posh hotels, dine in trendy restaurants and fly in a chartered jet, avoiding crowded terminals, delays and starchy foods.

"The first time you get on a chartered jet, you say, 'My God, these guys have it easy,' " said veteran forward Ben Guite, who has the added perspective of more spartan travel.

For seven years, Guite banged around the minor leagues in a bus, the interstate his home.

"In my first year, our owner decided to cut costs," Guite said. "So (he) got rid of the sleeper. He told us, 'Don't worry about it. I'll take care of you guys.' On the (new) bus, he'd taken away seven rows on the middle. We got to sleep - on the floor. The older guys were saying, 'This is unbelievable.' It was something out of Slap Shot."

But Guite quickly learned that life in the sprawling NHL West is hardly a vacation.

"It's a grind. It never stops," he said.

Finding diversions

That's why it's crucial to find ways to feel at home on the road. Some players strum guitars during the long hours before games; some lose themselves in Internet games or cards; others shuffle through malls or unwind with movies.

"But it's tough to pass the time anytime you're out there for more than a week," Avalanche defenseman Jordan Leopold said. "Movies only go so far. They're only so many of them. You can't get stuck in your hotel room. You have to find stuff to do."

But leaving a warm, comfy Hyatt hotel in the dead of winter isn't easy in, say, Edmonton, where winds whip through the streets and temperatures dip well below zero, icing ears and nostril hairs in mere seconds.

"If you're in Vancouver, well, that's a beautiful city. There are so many great cities out there - New York, Boston," Guite said.

"But an off day in Edmonton and Calgary is pretty long. You've got the malls, but . . ."

Coaches try to lighten the load. A couple of years ago, Avalanche players and coaches squared off against one another in an Edmonton bowling alley, with then-assistant coach Tony Granato rolling a 213. The comic relief came with a steady succession of gutter balls - another example of adjusting on the fly.

"You monitor how much you practice," Granato said. "For sure, the rest is important. You definitely adjust practice times and practice lengths."

After all the long hours in a hotel room, slow bus rides to and from the arena and bruising defeats, players look forward to regrouping back home. But coming home is a trial as well.

"After a game, it's toughest in Calgary and Edmonton, especially if you lose," Guite said. "The airport is so far away. And it takes longer to travel because you have to go back through customs. It's different on the way in. You go through, and the guys in customs say, 'Welcome home, boys.' "

"But on the way back, everyone's getting fingerprinted and photographed. A trip that should take two hours takes four or five hours. It was much easier before 9-11. I was in school back then, at Maine. There was this little post. The guy would come out, take my driver's license on a little piece of paper and say, 'Good luck this year.' There wasn't even a computer."

True grit

Some things never change in hockey. Hit the road, and Mother Nature hits back.

In 2000, four teams were stranded in the Raleigh, N.C., area following the worst snowstorm on record in that city, including the Phoenix Coyotes, who were stuck in their hotel for three days.

"Is this thing ever going to end?" Coyotes defenseman Teppo Numminen asked in The Arizona Republic.

But hockey players are a resilient bunch, able to plow through temporary barriers.

So are fans. In 2000, Taylor Railton traveled 16,384 miles by car to see a game in every NHL arena. His longest stretch of driving came during the All-Star break, from Florida to Denver.

"I almost quit twice," he told The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger. "Once, I was crossing the Canadian Rockies in snow with lots of trucks, and they wanted me out of the way. Then, in Arkansas, going from Dallas to Nashville, there was 12 inches of snow and no plows. I got stranded in my car overnight. I haven't slept in my car since I was a kid."

That's the Western spirit, the same kind of grit the Nashville Predators demonstrated in November, when they played six Western Conference foes on a 13-day trip that covered three time zones, two countries and 6,432 miles.

The same spirit the San Jose Sharks displayed last February, when they played eight road games in 16 nights while covering 5,756 miles, a nightmarish journey that included four games in five nights.

The spirit the Avs will have to muster from Feb. 20 to March 2, when they match their longest trip in club history.

On the road again.

In the NHL, those four simple words say all you need to know about the difference between the East and West.

"In the summer, I try not to travel," Guite said.

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