In December 1998, my mother invited my wife and I to a Christmas concert at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Before the concert, over dinner, my mother talked to us about her desire to go back to Israel for another tour vacation. It is said that when you visit the Holy Land you have a desire to visit again; my mother had visited Israel a few years previously, and her desire to return again was indeed strong.
However, based on that trip and on another she had made to the British Isles, she knew that she would need some travel companions. She had some health concerns did not want to be a burden on other travelers in the tour group. My mother then invited my wife and I to accompany her to Israel in the coming spring.
We were stunned. Neither of us had expected such an opportunity to tour the Holy Land at that point in our lives. Many desire to go to Israel yet never have the opportunity, and here one was being handed to us on a silver platter. We eagerly accepted my mother's offer.
We booked a tour with a company called Israel Revealed and our tour guide would be none other than Daniel Rona, who at the time was the only licensed LDS guide in Israel. A few months before the trip, we attended an orientation meeting at Israel Revealed's Utah offices where we were given tips and materials with which to prepare for the trip. We were counseled to take daily walks in order to prepare physically.
On April 11, 1999, a Sunday, we flew out of Salt Lake International Airport on the first leg of an 18 hour journey to the Holy Land. It seems so hard to believe, but 20 years have passed since that trip of a lifetime. Like my mother, my wife and I have desired to return, but there are times when I am not sure we will ever have that opportunity. To mark the this anniversary, I will be sharing some stories from the trip.
My wife had never been on a big jet airliner before, and she took some motion sickness tablets and hour before our scheduled departure. She squeezed my hand as we taxied, took off and banked onto an eastern course. I talked her through it, and she found that it was not bad at all.
Our first layover was in Cincinnati, Ohio, where we landed at 6:00 pm eastern time. We were on our way to the gate for the next flight -- at the other end of the terminal -- when I realized that I had left my camera bag on the plane. I ran back to the gate we had just exited, and I was allowed back on the aircraft, but my camera was gone. At the desk by the gate they told me that a flight attendant had found my bag in the overhead and had someone take it to the gate for our next flight.
They found my wife and gave her my camera, and she had them page me. I heard the page when I was about halfway back to the gate. After a ten minute wait, we boarded our next flight. We had a longer wait on the taxiway as we were slated as number four for takeoff.
We spent the night flying over the Atlantic. After watching a couple of movies, I found that I could not sleep. It was after 10:00 pm back home, and dark outside, but sleep was elusive. Not long after sunrise we flew over the beaches at Normandy and then south of Paris.
When we landed in Zurch, we had just enough time to walk from one end of the terminal to the other and board our flight for Tel Aviv. We were rushed, yet there seemed to be time as we waited to board for a quick trip to the restroom. I was wrong, though, as I found them holding the flight for me when I made it back to the gate -- mind you, they had already been holding the plane because our flight from Cincinnati had been stacked for twenty minutes before landing. Even so, we were the last three passengers to board.
This leg would be on a Swiss Air flight, and we were jammed in like sardines. I heard rather than saw the in-flight movie. I asked for the lasagna for lunch but got the turkey dish instead. It was not a pleasant flight. The man sitting next to me was a little inpatient when I asked him how to fill out a customs form -- I was the dumb American who was responsible for delaying departure a few extra minutes just so I could use the restroom, after all.
As a little history lesson, this was April of 1999, when NATO was conducting a bombing campaign of Yugoslavia over a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. Because of this, we had to fly further east before proceeding south to the Mediterranean Sea, adding many miles and an extra hour to the trip.
After the movie, we were soon on our final approach to David Ben-Gurion International Airport. The arrival terminal was not very modern, leaving us to exit down the stairs to board a shuttle to the terminal itself. There we found several long lines for the gates where we would present our passports.
My mother was a little confused about which line to stand in; suddenly she walked off to one side of the room and disappeared behind the passport booths. By the time I got to where I last saw her, she was nowhere to be seen. I was dumbfounded. The only thing I could think to do was to pick a line and wait our turn. I think my mother must have had the right idea, though, because once we finally got through, we found everyone from the tour group, including my mother, waiting for us.
We blew right through customs -- nothing to declare -- and boarded a tour group bus for the ride up to Jerusalem. Once more, though, we had to wait form group members flying in from London. After twenty minutes we were on our way into the unexpected.
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