Day 1 - A Trip of a 1000 miles...

With me and writing, sometimes the hardest thing to do is get started.  Once I get started I am kind of amazed how much I have to say.  Kind of like this post.  I have decided in my blog to approach my writing from a what I think is the most interesting approach.  Sometimes it will be "facts" or information about what it was we were looking at or learned, sometimes it will be the crazy feelings or realizations that come from culture and new experiences.  As I go along, I may divide one "day" into more than one blog.  Some days were just so intense (like the second day) that to blog about everything we saw and learned on that day would make an unreadable blog!  This particular post is close to that.  Conversely, I may condense some experiences as there was some overlap or like the Bible itself, it being all inspired but not all of it is inspiring.  I'll do my best to keep things moving along and readable.

Day One

I am counting the first day as the day we flew to Israel as that for me was a significant part of the learning curve.  Our day began early in Phoenix, AZ with a 6 hour flight to Philadelphia, PA.  Now 6 hours is the longest flight I can remember ever taking in one jump.  So, by the time I get to Philadelphia I am already to be done with flying.  An obvious fact that I will remember many times over this trip is that I am not a small person.  In my normal life I don't think about this too much, but when I travel, I am reminded all the time.  Sometimes every 5 minutes which is the average frequency of how often 420 on one airplane need to use the facilities.

They really don't make airplanes for people like me.  I try to get an aisle seat, but that really doesn't help that much.  Just sitting there I still take up too much space, my shoulder must extend into the aisle way as every person that walks by seems to make contact with it.  When the person in front of me inevitably wants to recline their seat, my knees sometimes really get crushed.  If I am not sitting there with my tray table down with food and drink on it, I can quickly kind of jump up a bit and avoid injury.  Then I have to resort to stealing a little room from my wife's space and a little from the aisle which then that knee joins that shoulder in getting whacked by those traveling the aisle.  

So, when we get ready to board an 11 hour flight from Philadelphia to Tel Aviv, after an already 6 hour flight from Phoenix to Philadelphia, I know what I am in for.  Again, these are the sorts of things no one thinks to take pictures of.  So I don't have a lot to offer you visually.  

It is interesting to me how the crew of the airline helps you with the effects of the prolonged flight and time adjustments.  It seemed that we were served a meal rather quickly after we boarded the aircraft and were underway.  I kind of like that part.  This being an overseas flight, the meal was part of our ticket price which doesn't happen on Alaska Airlines anymore.  They also really push the beverages, water mostly.  Probably every 20 minutes throughout the flight someone was offering us water to drink.  Now you know why I get whacked on the shoulder all night.  Not long after dinner, they darken the cabin and ask all the window seat people to close the shades on their window.  They encourage us all to sleep.  

Well, I just don't sleep on airplanes.  How can I describe this to you?  First, the seat.  It is made for people like my wife.  The leg room, the width of the seat, where her head rests naturally against the seat cushion, yada, yada, yada.  None of that is true for me.  The place my head is supposed to rest hits me just below the shoulders.  I don't have the room to slide forward so my head eventually will make contact with the seat because my legs already do not have any room.  I think all the folks in our row might object to asking if I can lay across all their laps.  Even if they didn't mind I know I would be getting up all night so they could go to the bathroom.  

So, fortunately they DO have little screens in the seat backs and they DO have movies you can watch!  I watched 4 full length, current run movies all the way to Tel Aviv.  One was actually pretty good (the Book Thief).  The only problem was my little jack into which I was trying to plug my ear phones was broken.  So, unless I held it in a certain way 100% of the time, it was nothing but static.  So I got to hear about 75% of the sound tracks as for no special reason the special way I was holding the ear phone jack quit working and I had to figure it all out again.  Poor JoLynn's ear phone jack had something broken off inside of it and she couldn't use hers at all.  Kind of made you feel like we were flying a real rust bucket across the Atlantic.  

Despite the disappointments, it was so much better to have some kind of distraction besides rereading Sky Mall a dozen times and the in-flight magazine.  Speaking of Sky Mall, do you know you can buy costumes for your little dog?  Yes!  It's true.  Your little mutt can be "Batdog", "Spiderdog" or "clowndog".  From the pictures in Sky Mall, they really look like they are having fun.  In case you have more money you need to throw away, they have amazing plants that grow out of pottery that looks like Bozo the Clown.  Honestly I don't know how I have gotten along without a Sky Mall catalog for this long.  

Not long before we land in Tel Aviv, the crew jumps into hyper drive and serves us a quick breakfast.  They instruct the window seat people to open their shades.  The sun is BLAZINGLY BRIGHT.  This is not a surprise to me as all "night" long the guy across from my seat sitting at the window kept "peeking".  Since we had crossed the international date line we had been in perpetual sunlight most of the flight.  So, every time he "peeked" I would get this blinding flash of light in a otherwise darkened cabin.  Think of your little son or daughter shining a flashlight in your eyes in the dark "just to make sure it was still working."   Since I only could see blue spots I don't know if he saw me nodding in his direction as if to say, "yep, it's still the sun out there!"

So, we land and make our way into the airport.  We pass customs relatively quickly (of course the guy in front of us was obviously some kind of terrorist as they wanted to talk to him for a long time).  We were happy to see our luggage arrived on the same flight as we did and that there were people there to greet us.  

We boarded nice buses and were off to our hotel.  We had a FABULOUS buffet dinner (another thing I did not think to take a picture of).   So many different salads, and fruits and many things I have no idea what they were.  Some items tasted nothing like they looked like and some items tasted exactly  like what they looked like.  So much!  We also had a group orientation and then we were sent to our rooms, which was fine with me as I hadn't been asleep in over 24 hours by that point.  Our room was so nice.  We had a beautiful view of the Mediterranean Sea, the harbor and the business district of Tel Aviv.

Something we didn't appreciate soon enough was we were next door to the Pussycat Club.  No kidding.  About 1 am when the jet lag thing kicks in and I wake up, the "thump, thump thump" of music from that particular establishment was pretty apparent.  No worries, I was laying flat in a real bed and I was in Israel.