A Great Adventure, Part 2

Another Day of Travelling

Tuesday, May 2^nd 2017

I checked and re-checked all the packing, had breakfast, then we loaded the car with what we were taking with us. At around 10am, we set off for Heathrow. 

It isn’t really that far from S’s house, but it took us two hours!! After leaving our car with valet parking and making sure we had all our luggage and papers with us, we went to find the meeting place where we were to meet our tour group. I had remembered it as being Starbucks, but in fact it was Café Nero – well, that was close enough J

The company we had booked with met us first – we were dutifully wearing our ID tags round our necks – and they introduced us to the others and the tour group leaders, John and Jim, who would be coming with us to keep us in order. In all, there were to be 26 of us on the tour. Once we were all assembled (no, we weren’t last), we set off to get through security, which, because of our destination, was more stringent than we had been used to before. (yes, I am aware I haven’t told you what that destination is yet, but be patient and all will be revealed in due course). Once through security, we had about an hour before boarding, so everyone scattered to get some lunch. We got a sandwich at Pret a Manger and some water from Smiths. we also wandered around a bit and got a couple of photos of planes on the ground from the viewing window.

Eventually we were all on the plane. I had never been on such a large plane before. Not only did it have seats either side of the aisle, but it actually had two aisles with a bank of seats between them. As we were travelling as a group, we were all seated close together. OH and I were next to the window (him) and in the middle (me) of a set of three seats. A lady (Mary) was seated on the aisle end of our row and her husband (Philip) was seated behind her, also on the aisle end.

There was a delay on take-off. Apparently a woman had been taken ill, so they needed to take her off the flight. Good thing we hadn’t already taken off really. Anyway, they also managed to retrieve her luggage from the hold. It was all very efficient and we were only delayed by half an hour or so. I hoped the woman was okay, but I was also eager to be off.

The take-off was very smooth – the smoothest I have experienced. Not that I am much travelled on planes, but I’ve been on a few. Maybe it was because it was a much bigger plane, but there was none of that ‘pinned-to-your-seat’ feeling as we rose into the air. I chatted with Mary for a while. She told me she and her husband were travelling with her sister, Joy, and her husband (also called Philip, but called Phil to reduce confusion). Philip and Mary are in their early 80s and were really looking forward to the trip. If I remember rightly, they had not been to our destination before.

It was a great flight. After the miserable weather yesterday, we were happy to see sunshine, even if it was through the plane's windows!

We even got to see a pretty great sunset too

During the flight, it became apparent that all was not well with Philip. He and Mary had taken a gentle walk the day before and his foot had become painful. It got steadily worse, to the extent that he could bear to have his shoe or even his sock touching it. A flight attendant brought some ice as his foot had swelled suddenly, as well as being extremely painful.

We landed at 10.25pm (their time), which was our scheduled arrival time, so we had caught up the lost half hour. Getting through customs was very slow – the man in the cubicle dealing with the queue we were standing in was dealing with one person for everyone else’s three – and that is not an exaggeration; I had plenty of time to count! It took an hour to get through passport control and then a bit longer searching for a member of our party who apparently couldn’t follow instruction. We had been told where to wait and regroup after collecting our luggage, but she was nowhere in sight. After about ten minutes, we found her and then went to meet the young woman who was going to be our Guide for the duration of our stay. Her name was Angelina.

We all piled onto our bus, including Philip. As we had drawn near to our destination, the stewardess had called ahead to arrange for a wheelchair to take him from the plane to the bus. All credit to Philip, not once did I hear him complain and while he needed some assistance, he managed to climb onto the bus himself too. Once we were all seated, we were introduced to Bishara who was our driver for the trip and then we set off.

The journey to the hotel was 45 minutes. Angelina thought we would all be tired, but at home it was still only 10pm, albeit midnight here. However, we needed to be up at 6.30am to enable us to have breakfast before leaving the hotel at 8am for our first day the next morning.

At the hotel, an ambulance was waiting to whisk Philip, his wife and one of our tour leaders, Jim, to the hospital. The hotel provided us with the keys to our rooms and, because we had missed dinner (by about 4 or 5 hours!!), they gave us a boxed meal of sandwiches, salad, juice and cake. We had been given a meal on the plane, 

Shepherd's pie, or maybe lasagne, if I remember correctly

so I wasn’t really hungry. Added to that, it was quite late for eating, so sadly most of mine was wasted L

The room seemed fine, though to be honest, I didn’t really look at it when we first arrived. I made sure I had everything I would need for the next day and dropped into bed. Having not slept well the night before, I fell asleep straight away, probably with a smile on my face. I had known we were coming for some time; it was my 60^th birthday earlier this year and OH had said he wanted to do something special for my birthday, how would I like to go to…. This was for me the trip of a lifetime; I was in a place I never expected I would ever be able to visit:

Welcome to Israel J