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.