I need to start working on putting this trip on the written page sooner rather than later. I have as many pictures to go through as I have locations to remember and emotions to revisit. The entirety of the meaning to why I chose the name "An Unmarked Passport" for my website can be found in my first trip out of the country.
I mentioned on the homepage that, although I have extensively travelled the continental United States, those travels are safely contained within the borders of the U.S. By "safe" I mean I didn't have to gear up for any particular cultural shift. I never had to learn how to ask where the bathroom is or figure out how much money I need or question whether or not it is socially acceptable to eat with my left hand. When travelling from Connecticut to Oregon, the biggest ordeal I came up against is what the locals call 'soda' (pop, coke) or if I was allowed to pump my own gas or not.
I knew this trip was going to be different and I was right, but not in the way that I expected. Everything leading up to the trip was the standard fair. Tickets were purchased, luggage was packed, passports were found, preparations were made. It would be the longest vacation I have taken to date at two weeks long, and we would be making use of every available minute available.
We departed PDX early one Saturday afternoon to reach our first connection in San Francisco where I would come up against one of many firsts on a long list of experiences I had never had before: the International Terminal. We were flying on an airline that had only one flight into the U.S. and one outgoing flight each day. Fortunately, we checked our bags and they would be forwarded on to our final destination so we had nothing to carry with us. We were only changing airlines so, all that was needed would be our new boarding passes. Easy enough, right? Not exactly. We were wrong. Oh, we were so very wrong.
I had never seen a line in any airport that rivaled what we had stumbled into. I understand now why some flights recommend arriving to the airport three hours early. This line wasn't just an orderly file through the stanchions like we are used to seeing in banks, this line had burst from it's confinement and snaked down the hallway into other areas of the airport. Each group of people in the line consisted of two to six people, each of whom had at least 3 pieces of luggage that needed to be processed and sent down to the plane as well. To put it mildly, this was going to take us some time... At least it should have taken us some time. As it happens, a lone staff worker was off to the side so, I held our place in line while my husband went and worked his magic and, lo and behold, we received our coveted boarding passes and were able to skip that monstrous line.
The next 16 hours or so were unremarkable, mostly just us trying to find ways to get comfortable and grab what fitful sleep we could under the circumstances. We (finally) touched down in Turkey and, for the first time in my life, my feet touched the ground in a foreign country. I'm sure the occasion would have felt more momentous, but we had to run to catch our one, final connection to Tel Aviv. This flight was much shorter and I was grateful for it. I had grown irritated in my immobility and just wanted out. As I was getting ready to run down the aisle to freedom the closer we got to Israel, my huband had grown more reflective and quiet. It would have been almost 10 years to the day that he had left his country to make a life for himself in America. Together, we had to work through years of obstacles just to be able to get to the point of catching this flight back the country of his birth.
Here he is, seeing Tel Aviv from the window of the plane for the first time in a decade. I was just exhausted, I could only imagine what he was thinking. Did you know that, when a plane touches down in Israel, all of the passengers clap and sing? I did not. I was tired and not in camera mode so I missed the opportunity but, the passengers in the plane were joyous and energetic. I believe the song was "Hevenu Shalom Aliechem" which means "We bring peace to this land". I'll skip through the passport check, baggage claim, and car rental as these are not new experiences and need no explanation.
I will end this article here because the next two weeks deserve to be taken slowly. I feel I've written enough about the first leg of this journey. I will break down the major points of this trip over however many articles it takes. Some of the places we visited were:
Jerusalem.
Eilat
The Red Sea
The Dead Sea
Tel Aviv
And MONKEYS!
And quite a few other places we stopped in between. Two weeks to see as much as we did felt a little overwhelming at the beginning. I wasn't worried, my tour guide was a local after all and I was on his home turf.
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