Tel Aviv

October 19 Wed

We arrived at 4:30 in the morning. When we deplaned, we saw an Israeli attendant standing by the plane's door. I saw a pair of empty wheelchairs behind her, but she told us very sharply that they were not for us. She told us we had to walk a distance down a hallway where we would find another attendant who would deal with us. Around several corners we came to the beginning of a long concourse, where other disabled passengers were getting into a golf cart. There was no room for us and the golf cart drove off leaving us behind. This is where and when we lost our cool. Not one single airport among all of those we'd passed through as we circumnavigated the planet greeted us with the inconsideration we were met with here in our home country. Welcome home world travelers! Some welcome! We had been met with deference and civility and special consideration everywhere else. But this is Israel.

Our rough Israeli edginess had been smoothed over by everyone else's pleasantness everywhere else in the world. It was time for us to adopt that edginess all over again, now that we were back. The thought crossed my mind that it was a mistake to have missed Israel so much. We expressed our pique to the next attendant we saw, who called on her walkie-talkie for another golf-cart and apologized for the rude reception we'd received, but our smoldering thoughts were not doused by her words. Shortly thereafter, another golf-cart rolled up and we were conveyed with an electric purr to where everyone else had gathered for passport control. Here, an attendant standing beside a wheelchair helped Razelle off the golf-cart and helped her get comfortable in the wheelchair. We, as entering citizens, were beckoned forward by the woman in the glass booth when she saw Razelle in the wheelchair, so we didn't even get to or need to use our magnetic cards in the palm reader that we had acquired on our way out of this same airport 121 days ago at the beginning of our Odyssey. Onward we rolled to baggage claim where, without any problems, every single one of our four bags came to us on the conveyer belt. Our bags had circled the world and returned to their starting point, too, a slight bit scuffed compared to their pristine condition at the outset, but without any damage to them, for all the gorillas who'd stacked them in the bellies of all the planes they'd been shoveled into and out of.

All that remained to truly complete our journey now was to get back to Beer Sheva from the airport. Shalev was waiting for us in the arrivals hall. He had been given leave from the army to come after us. We embraced and smiles broadened all our faces. Shalev led us to where he'd parked the car. The first thing I noticed was how dusty it was. I had forgotten how dusty the air is where we live in the Negev Desert. Shalev asked if I wanted to drive, but I let him do that. I wanted him to know we trusted him and I sensed he was pleased to show he could be responsible. We reached home as dawn broke and herded all our bags into the elevator and up to our apartment. Time to decompress!

Four month's worth of traveling led us to where we had started. It was odd to be in our home after so long a time away. We had adjusted to calling each and every temporary accommodation all along our route "home." But these walls around us now embraced us and welcomed us back. Unpacking would wait until we had decompressed. Stories of our travels jumbled together in the telling. Mail had accumulated. The house looked well maintained. An infestation of moths had afflicted our stored food and needed attention while we were gone. The smell of bug spray still lingered in the cabinet. There was very little food in the house. We'd have to stock up again. We had some laundry to do. But we welcomed all these with good cheer. Be it ever so humble there's no place like home … Home Sweet Home.

Did this experience change us? Yes. Inwardly we knew we had accomplished something monumental. No. We were back where we had started. One thing did change worth mentioning. Razelle said our next trip has to be a caravan trip through England and Scotland. I've always had the travel bug. Now Razelle had caught it too. That made my day. In fact, it made everything worth the effort.

London to Tel Aviv

October 18 Tue

Waking in our hotel room and turning on the TV, we saw Gilad Shalit himself being interviewed on Egyptian Television by a Palestinian Reporter. It was painful to watch. He looked weak and out of breath, but intact – something we were never sure of until now. He had the presence of mind to tactfully and diplomatically answer the politically freighted questions the reporter asked him – one last bit of torment before letting him go. The price for his release was steep (as was the price of his captivity).

Razelle still expressed no interest in seeing the sights of London and I was again mindful of the problem we were going to face hauling all our round-the-worldly possessions up to and through check-in one last glorious time. As carefully and calculatingly as I had packed each hefty or feather-weighted item into each bag in New York, here in London we had opened and used some of those items and getting them back into the proper bag in the proper position in that bag was more on my mind that the streets of London. I had no way of weighing the bags here, so everything was based on my best guesstimation, for the present. If it had all fit before, it had to all fit again. It simply had to. We had acquired nothing new here in London.

I sallied forth once more to forage for food. I now knew the way to the Tesco express and I knew what they had to offer. I paid more attention to the features of the landscape this time. Every time I crossed an intersection I saw "Look Right" painted on the pavement. It surprised me that I actually needed this reminder each time. Spending so many weeks in the United States had caused me to unlearn this simple rule of pedestrian survival. Every so often a big red double-decker bus came up behind me and surprised me as it whooshed by because it was on the opposite side of the street from what I subconsciously expected. Today's weather was a carbon-copy of yesterday's. I began to suspect that Razelle was right about the sameness of London's weather. At the Tesco express I bought the same food I'd bought yesterday: tuna-and-cucumber sandwiches and chocolate and strawberry milkshakes. I used as many of my "shrapnel" coins to pay for it as I could, but I still received more shrapnel in change anyway. Beyond saying, "Thank you" I had no need to speak and betray my origins, but the cashier's reply of "Your welcome" betrayed his Indian sub-continental roots. I walked further down Bath Street to a large traffic circle and watched cars circling it clock-wise (which again seemed unnatural to my addled mind's eye) then returned part of the way to the hotel on the opposite side of the street (for a change of scenery). The empty expanses behind chain-link fences on this side were parking lots for discarded soft-drink cans. Several hotels more prestigious than ours were also located on that side of the street. Almost no one was out walking. Of the very few who were, one or two of those who passed me looked familiar from our hotel lobby. Apparently, I wasn't the only food forager among its guests. Crossing back to the residential side of the street I saw the double-decker buses approaching this time. I had a faint urge to just get on one and ride it as far into London as it would take me. The diagrams on the Plexiglas bus shelters indicated that enticing districts lay ahead waiting to be explored, but the urge was too faint to act upon it, so I kept walking.

Back at the room we ate our food. Razelle didn't want the milkshakes so I drank the strawberry one and saved the chocolate one for later.

The boredom was getting to me. Our flight wasn't scheduled to leave until 22:30, but getting to the airport 3 hours before that seemed to be academic. Getting there even earlier made more sense to me. Leaving the hotel this soon didn't make sense to Razelle, but my nervousness convinced her to get her things together and help me convey it all down in the elevator in several trips. The next airport shuttle was not due for about 25 minutes, but I needed to be standing at the curb or it would just pass by. We checked out without using our room the second night and the desk clerk was surprised. Had we found fault with our accommodations? Were we leaving due to something they could rectify? None of the above; we simply had a flight to catch. It was too complicated to explain to the clerk so we left him flummoxed.

I stood out in the cold with all our bags stacked beside me and looked up the street for the shuttle as my breath condense before me in the cold evening air. Razelle waited just inside next to the vending machines. When the shuttle finally arrived we piled in with our bags and sat near the front and started a conversation with the driver. I tried to place his accent. We hadn't heard one like it yet since arriving in London. All I could guess was that it was from an English-speaking country somewhere in the world. I told him I guessed he was from Australia or maybe South Africa. He acted as though I had insulted him. He said he was a genuine Brit from birth, thank you very much, and he'd never lived anywhere else nor had he ever wanted to. We had been in London a day and a half and he was the first native-born English speaker we had heard in all that time (that we knew of). He did aspire to traveling soon though, with the Missus, after he retired. We gave him one of our Gold Jerusalem Hamsa refrigerator magnets and a nice tip as well for his pleasantries (and to jettison some more of our "shrapnel"). Of the original 100 Hamsa magnets we started out with four months ago, we have handed out more than 80, counting that one.

Into the airport we went. The last hurdle remained to be crossed and we would be truly homeward bound. I approached an idle check-in clerk and asked him, "If our bags were a kilo-or-three over the limit would that really matter?" He answered, "British Airways very strictly enforces all its regulations." He pointed to an area where several people were already busy with their baggage. There were tables and scales available there for opening and weighing luggage. I took Razelle and all our stuff over there and weighed each item. Their aggregate weight was over the limit, not by very much, but still over. Beads of sweat formed on my brow as I tackled this logistics puzzle head-on. Books out of one bag, shirts transferred to it, one less coat in one bag and worn instead, lighter shoes traded bags with heavier shoes, our carry-on bags stuffed even fuller. After perhaps twenty minutes of this (while Razelle remained discretely silent, but intensely attentive) I had every single bag weighing exactly 100 grams below the regulation limits and each bag weighing exactly the same weight as the next. And our carry-on bags accommodated the surplus weight without becoming over-sized. Around me were fellow travelers struggling with the same challenge. Some came with taped up heavy cardboard boxes for destinations in darkest British Africa. They had no chance of ever making their stuff comply. It was sad watching them. They hadn't a clue until they had reached the airport that they would face this problem. In the end, they actually left items behind.

We went over to our own check-in clerk for our British Airways flight to Tel Aviv when that counter opened. I told the clerk what we were told to say after our encounter in New York with an uninformed clerk there. I set each item on the scale. Each item still weighed exactly the same as the next, but their weights were actually 200 grams below the limit instead of only 100 grams. Sneaky airport scales! The bags were accepted, duly tagged and whisked away behind a wall and out of sight. The next time we would see them, we'd be in a Hebrew-speaking country.

A nervous man of slight build arrived with a wheelchair and took charge of ushering us through passport control and boarding-pass inspection. We reached a station beyond which I could not carry liquids. I still hadn't drunk my chocolate milkshake. Too bad! I left it beside the turbine-wearing ethnic Sikh inspector and passed through the metal detector. After I did he went off shift and left his station. I said to our wheelchair pusher that no one would notice if I just took back my milkshake in that case. I was joking. (Good thing he had a sense of humor.) He allowed us to explore the duty-free shops on our own rather than take Razelle directly to the boarding gate. Razelle found food that appealed to her but after we purchased it we still had some heavy metal "shrapnel" coins to try and get rid of. I wheeled Razelle to the boarding gate and looked for one last something to spend them on. 

A bookstore had the kind of books Razelle has been devouring throughout our trip. I found something she'd appreciate and took its picture with my cell phone and returned to Razelle to see if I should get it: "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest." That suited her and it was the last thing we purchased on our entire trip around the world. 

When our flight was called, Razelle in her wheelchair and I were the first passengers allowed through the boarding gate. But until someone came to us to push her to the plane we had to wait and watch many of the other passengers pass through and walk down the ramp. Several passengers really were stopped for having one too many carry-on bags or ones that were too large in size. The guy downstairs wasn't joking about how strict British Airways was. We had run the gauntlet without antagonizing the airlines; others weren't so lucky. Finally we were wheeled to the door of our plane and we found our seats and stowed our hefty (but not too hefty) carry-on bags. We buckled up and prepared for our last flight. Five hours in the air and we would reach our point of departure and our round-the-world experiences would be one for the books.

London

October 17 Mon

Our overnight flight brought us to London on the morning of October 17th. We were met at the plane by a wheelchair, pushed by a man who was obviously of non-native ethnicity. He expedited our entry into England and patiently waited while we claimed and stacked our luggage and changed some of our money into British Pounds. We had made it this far with all our stuff and hoped to just identify our luggage and leave it at the airport to wait for our connecting flight. But alas, here is where my lack of experience caught up with me. Because we would be flying out of London more than 24 hours later, we couldn't leave our bags. We had to take them to our hotel and come back with them when we were ready to fly again. Our wheelchair attendant then took us to the spot where the shuttle to our hotel would stop to collect us, and left us. The shuttle driver who stopped for us was very muscular and wrestled most of our bags into the shuttle. We rode the shuttle all the way around the perimeter of Heathrow Airport on the opposite side of the road from the one I had been driving on in America for so long that it looked odd to me again, even though it shouldn't have, considering how much driving I had done in Australia so many months ago. We and our bags were dropped off at the curb in front of the Hotel Ibis, the accommodations I had arranged for while we were still in Atlanta. Razelle watched over them while I went looking for a cart. A lot of business-types were checking in at the same time, so carts were scarce.

We checked in for two nights, even though we planned to only be there one night.

It cost us less to pay for the extra unused night than it would have cost to keep our room extra hours past check-out time after the first night (for which they would have charged us an hourly rate). Our flight home – the last flight of this epic journey – is scheduled to leave late tomorrow. The elevator was in great demand, so Razelle sat in the lobby with some of our bags while I herded the others into the elevator. I found our room, opened it and saw that it was a bit cramped for space. The window was partly open and I struggled with its hard-to-work mechanism until I managed to get it closed against the chill London air. The view from our room was of planes coming in for a landing on Heathrow's tarmac against a backdrop of London's leaden sky.

Razelle come up with me as I brought up the last of our bags, and switched on our television. Most of our channels were an array of more BBC channels than I even knew existed. There was also Sky News. We were immediately transfixed by the latest news that greeted our eyes and ears. After so many years without knowing the true fate of Gilad Shalit, here he was: the subject of breaking news on Sky and BBC broadcasts. Gilad Shalit had been captured in June 2006 by tunneling Palestinians in a cross-border raid from Gaza and then hauled back through the same tunnel and hidden beyond rescue.  In the years that have ensued, there have been public campaigns, secret negotiations, bumper stickers and websites dedicated to securing his release, not to mention the shedding of blood and loss of property on both their side and ours. There have been national debates and hand-wringing over what price is too high (or whether there is such a thing a too high a price) to pay to have this bespectacled slip of a boy back with his family. And of all things, our last full day abroad, here we see that Gilad Shalit will make it home ahead of us, in exchange for over a thousand prisoners that Israel will be releasing (half now and half later). We had to be in Europe to be able to see this kind of intense news coverage. It reminded us of how little exposure we had had of Israeli news during our sojourn in America, and served to prepare us for re-immersion into the intense life we lead in the Israel that we are about to return to.

Here we are in London, with a day and a half intentionally budgeted into our trip by me for a window of opportunity to see something of London's landmarks and instead we are watching television in our cramped hotel room. Razelle had finally reached the point where leaving the cozy confines of our hotel room had no more appeal than the sunless London sky outside our window. We did venture forth to see what fare the dining hall had to offer for the mid-day meal. I ordered fish and chips. How could I not order this while here in London? The prices were a bit much, but the food was good. Our waitress was another non-native individual. And I thought I had an accent (American English, don't cha know)! Our waitress's accent was exotic enough that I didn't understand her at first (not veddy Brittish at all!).

Razelle and I went back to the room, but I was getting more restless as the hours passed. I had only been to London once before, and that was for a mere 4 hours on my way to immigrating to Israel in 1978. As it so happens, that was on the 19th of October of that year. The weather then was precisely identical to the weather outside on this October day. Razelle says that that's not so remarkable; it's like this in London most every day. How dreary! She has spent time here in the past and must know from whence she speaks.

Because of the cost of lunch, I decided that I would at least venture forth on foot a reasonable distance from the hotel and see what I could find foraging for food at a grocery store or even at an omnipresent McDonald's (they're everywhere, there everywhere) and secure some food at less expense.

The hotel lobby has a giant interactive map on a central pillar. You can select a category and it will show you where establishments of that type are found. I waited very patiently while an oriental guest of the hotel played and played and played with the options. I couldn't believe how inconsiderate he seemed. I had nothing more urgent to do than study this person, so I did. Eventually he became aware of someone staring at the back of his head and with great embarrassment he left the map to me.

Sure enough, there was a McDonald's restaurant within walking distance. I set out to explore the neighborhood. Something about the opposite flow of traffic and the overcast sky got me confused about which way I was going. After walking a block I returned to the hotel and the map to try again to set out in my intended direction. I followed the road that separated the Hotel Ibis and Heathrow Airport (Bath Road) for about a kilometer. As I walked a saw plane after plane come down out of the pewter-grey sky a few minutes apart and noted their tail insignias. Most of the air traffic I saw coming into Heathrow had British Airways markings. The constant wind had a chilling bite to it that made my eyes water. The homes built almost at the sidewalk's edge along Bath Road had planters with forlorn-looking flowering plants in them that weren't too cheery this time of year. I crossed a slow-flowing creek and saw a pair of mallards turn tail and hide behind the foliage at the water's edge. A small plaque on the short stone bridge that conveyed traffic across this creek announced that it had been erected in 1776. That date made me pause in my tracks and marvel at its coincidental significance to me. I came to a small commercial center that had small ethnic food stores and restaurants, and a gathering of kids in school uniforms that were loitering in knots before heading for home after school, which apparently had just been let out. They all looked non-native to me as well (I couldn't guess whether from the Indian sub-continent or from the West Indies, or perhaps from the Middle East). I entered a small grocery store, called Tesco express. I studied the items they had for sale and decided to get some ready-made tuna-and-cucumber sandwiches for Razelle and some chocolate milkshakes and strawberry milkshakes for both of us. I knew that the McDonald's was somewhere farther ahead but I gave up trying to reach it now that I had food. I did however make a mental note of the Kebab Centre and the Domino's Pizza I had passed. I paid for my purchase with the paper Pound Notes I had gotten at the airport and was rewarded with heavy coins in change. Now I know why Australian money is so heavy and clunky. They have the same "shrapnel" there as Mother England has here.

Razelle had no enthusiasm or interest in salvaging what was left of the day to see something – anything – of London, so we stayed put while Razelle ate her sandwiches and I drank the milkshakes. 

New York to London

October 16 Sun

Today I awoke with excitement and anxiety at the onus of moving along to another continent by air travel. The day of a flight I cannot help but dwell on the fact that everything has to work out time-wise or unpleasant consequences may ensue that I don't even want to contemplate. I was now of a mindset to leave, but there was still half a day's worth of hours to live through before flight time.

Razelle had scheduled one more family-member's visit at Monte and Mindy's. Her first-cousin Nicki lives in Manhattan and was scheduled to arrive at noon. She needed to be picked up at the Baldwin train station, so Monte went after her at the appointed time, and Mindy also left to buy cold cuts for a deli-style lunch in the house. Razelle and Nicki had much to talk about and I was left to my mental checklists and last-minute re-thinking of how to better pack all our luggage than I already had before – in fact, several times before. I interacted with everyone present, somewhat, but my mind was elsewhere. We had reached critical mass with all we had amassed on our journey, and I was more aware of this than anyone else seemed to be.

After photo ops with everyone taking turns being in the shots or taking the shots (Nicki's camera took that momentous occasion to misbehave and not capture the moment) it was time to say good bye to her; Nicki was the last in a long series of relatives Razelle and I had managed to spend quality time with all over this continent. Monte took her back to the station to meet her 6:30 PM train, and when he returned I was ready to pack our bags into his car. 

Even though our flight was scheduled for 9:55 PM I was too antsy to loiter any longer. There were too many unobliging variables to contend with for me to be comfortable waiting any longer. This was it; time for one last set of hugs and good-byes with Mindy. Monte and I struggled with the configuration of the bags in his trunk and finally ended up putting some of them in his back seat; not a reassuring thing at all. As Monte drove us to JFK he gave us an earful about his less-than-pleasant experiences with Israelis, the very people we were imminently poised to return to after some four months separation from them. We pulled up to the curb at the British Airways departure doors and found two luggage carts for all our stuff. One more set of hugs with Monte and we turned, pushing our belongings through the terminal's doors and switched mentally to "airport mode."

The woman at check-in announced that we would have to pay extra for two of our fours pieces of luggage. I firmly held my ground and told her she was misinformed AND mistaken. This went on for a few moments until a supervisor appeared. She had overheard the dispute from a distance and approached the clerk. She informed the clerk that we, as round-the-world ticket holders, were correct in insisting that we were in fact entitled to two pieces of luggage each. The supervisor helped us further by making sure that our luggage would be approved at the next and final leg of our journey so this argument wouldn't happen again. (Our bags didn't all weigh what they should but they were close enough). To further ameliorate the unpleasantness we had just experienced she upgraded our tickets on this flight to London to first class! We gave her one of our Jerusalem refrigerator magnets as a token of our gratitude (to learn that she was Jewish and intended to visit Israel soon herself). After all our concerns about getting this far, everything turned out for the best. We flew to London in the lap of luxury. So this is what it feels like to be in peerage instead of steerage.