Travel day

Traveling day - First off, thank you Jenny for taking me to the airport this morning.  I am currently sitting on a plane bound from Denver to New York.  I met up with a portion of our group at DIA before we boarded the plane.  It was nice to see some faces I haven't seen in over a dozen years.  I also met my roommate for the next 11 days.  At JFK airport in New York we will meet up with the remainder of our group.  We are a group of 33 people in total and for once I am not among the oldest in the group.  From here we have a 9 hour, overnight flight, directly to Tel Aviv with ELAL.  We arrive late afternoon local time on Tuesday.

Beyond the spiritual experience I am looking forward to the cultural, historical and of course the gastronomical experience.
---
Well now I am through security at JFK and I am sitting at the gate waiting to board the flight to Tel Aviv.  During check in with ELAL I was pulled aside for questioning.  They did not like the fact that I had a VISA from Egypt in my passport.  Then after further investigation I don't think they liked the additional stamps in my passport from Uganda, Ethiopia, and Russia.  They wanted to know if I still communicate with anyone in Egypt, where in Egypt I visited, whether I went to Muslim sights, the purpose of all my trips and my reason for going Israel.  I think they were just trying to correlate stories from different people on our trip.  Security was courteous but thorough.

I had my first minor scare.  I thought I forgot the power supply for my laptop.  Fortunately I did not, otherwise my blog updates would have ended after my this entry.  There is no free wifi at JFK.  It's kinda of funny you have to pay to access “free public wifi”.  Hmm...sound fishy to me.  Well this post will have to wait until I arrive in Israel.  Hopefully I'll get several hours of sleep on the flight.
---
Tuesday ended with us arriving in Tel Aviv in the late afternoon.  After dinner a couple of us walked down to the beach.  I was able to soak my feet in the Mediterranean Ocean and walk down the boardwalk.  I hope to be able to post this soon.