(Israel/Palestine) Sunday, January 4

It’s Tuesday night and this is the first chance I’ve actually been able to sit down and write about what’s been going on. Katie and I are going to put this mini blog together and try to keep you filled in on our trip, so sometimes it’ll be me writing and sometimes it’ll be Katie. It’s been an absolutely crazy couple of days since Katie and I left Houston. Mark and I drove over to Houston Friday afternoon because our flight was to leave at 9 am Saturday morning. We left the house about 6 AM in a driving thunderstorm and Whitney and Mark dropped us off at the airport right at 7. Everything look like the trip was starting out great, until about 5 minutes after we boarded when we heard the first of many announcements we were going to hear over the next 36 hours about our flights being delayed or cancelled. I won’t bore you with the many, many details of our travels, but to make a long story short, we got a free trip to Germany on our way to Tel Aviv! We got to Frankfurt about 9 am on Sunday and had 8 1/2 hours til our flight to Tel Aviv. We started trying to decide what to do for the day and the next thing you know, we were on the train to Wiesbaden. We checked the weather, things to see in the town, etc. and we were off. We didn’t think a little cool weather would bother us or the fact that Sunday’s are slow days in Germany. But after a 20 minute walk from the train station to the city center in 40° weather in slushy, melted snow in the little flats we had worn so our feet would be comfortable on the plane, we were like little popsicles! It should’ve been a dead giveaway that most of the town was closed on Sunday when there were no taxis at the train station, nor did we see any on the boulevard we were walking down to get to the old part of town. We resisted stopping at the first open coffee shop and finally found a little restaurant and had bowls of soup to thaw out. Nothing, absolutely nothing else was open. Not even the cathedral! You got to love this – it opens from 2 to 5 PM on Sunday afternoons. After looking in a few shop windows we decided to head back to the train station and go back to the airport. At least we could do little shopping there! We knew security would be a little more thorough flying into Israel, so we decided to go over to the terminal we were flying out of and just sit by the gate to wait for flight. Well, thorough be an understatement. After being questioned and our bags checked, we were checked, and I mean really checked. We were completely wanded and patted down on parts of our bodies that we never expected strangers to touch us! We both passed the test with flying colors and were allowed into the secure area. We hadn’t been sitting down for more than 5 or 10 minutes when an announcement was made, which to those who could evidently understand German wasn’t good news. They finally made it in English and we could understand the German’s reactions. The flight was going to be delayed because the crew was going to be late coming in from where ever they were coming from. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or leave the secure area and go get a drink! Fast forward- we stayed in the secure area, finally boarded the plane, and finally arrived in Tel Aviv about 11:30 pm Sunday night. We had only slept about four hours on the flight to Frankfurt, so we were pretty tired and a little discouraged when our bags never came off the carousel. We filled out forms and had to explain our flight itinerary and the airlines we were on to several people. The Israeli lost baggage claim employees make the US postal employees look efficient! Then they said that “if” they found our luggage, we’d have to come get it- they could not go to Bethlehem be use it is in Palestinian control. This is a whole other story for another day. We finally left the Tel Aviv airport about 12:30 am with a driver who had been sent to bring us to Bethlehem. First he couldn’t find his car, and then couldn’t figure out how to put the ticket in the exit gate. He got out of the car and walked away with Katie and I sitting in the backseat wondering what was going on. He also thought that we were headed to Jerusalem instead of Bethlehem. Losing confidence, Katie promptly got out and took a picture of the license plate and sent it to Whitney and told him if he never heard from us again, this was the car we left the airport in. The driver, Jamal, was so nice, but his English was very limited. He asked us the name of our hotel and when we told him, he kept saying he couldn’t get to Bethlehem. Katie and I were clueless as to what to do so she finally called her professor who was sound asleep at the hotel. He doesn’t speak Arabic, so he had to go get a desk clerk and call us back. Somehow they finally figured it out and we went way around Jerusalem to a different checkpoint and finally got to the hotel about 2 AM. We were cold, tired, had no luggage and had been in the same clothes for two days, so we walked into our room, turned the heater up, climbed into bed and fell asleep fully dressed. We knew that there wasn’t a thing we could do til morning. We agreed that we had a lot to be thankful for including the fact that we were together. We had a laugh together and said we’d look back on the last could of days as an adventure! Surprisingly, neither of us had shed a tear! It’s Tuesday night a little after 11 and we have to be up early tomorrow to leave for Nazareth so will try to catch up tomorrow– we’ve done a lot already! One teaser is that we are having a wonderful time now and so glad to be here on Epiphany. Lots going on in Bethlehem. P.S. Wifi at hotel is weak. We’ll add more pictures soon.