An aisle for an aisle

Thursday, November 8, 2012
Netanya, Israel – We made it! After what seemed like an interminable flight, we are on the ground halfway across the world, sitting in the comfort of a luxurious suite on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea in a city an hour’s drive north of Tel Aviv, where we landed earlier today.

“Today” is a rather uncertain term for us at the moment. There is a seven hour difference between here and Canada, so while the local clocks are telling us it’s close to supper time, our internal clocks are saying mid-morning! And in a rather plaintive tone of voice too.

To backtrack a bit, we left Ottawa yesterday at lunchtime, headed for Toronto. Upon our arrival, we hiked almost the entire length of Pearson International Airport to get from our arrival gate to the one where we would depart for Israel. Fortunately, there were moving sidewalks and all we had was our carry-on luggage. Then the waiting game began: more than three hours before we would take off again.

The sun was sinking to the horizon in a blaze of red and orange as we, and 298 other passengers, boarded the plane and took off at last. When we had gone online back home to print our boarding passes, we discovered that Val had a window seat on one side in row 21, and I had a window seat on the other side in row 20! Not the friendliest arrangement for our 12-hour flight. However, we hoped someone would be willing to switch.

As we found our seats and the other passengers theirs, we saw that both of us were next to people whose spouses were across the aisle from them in the middle section. So if anyone switched with our seat partners, we would be separating spouses! Oh well, as one of our tour companions put it, we would be sleeping most of the time anyway. Not entirely true. In all, we must have totaled an hour and a half, tops, of sleep. But we managed, in any case!

The TV screen on the seatback in front of us showed a tiny image of a plane making its way across the North Atlantic, over France, Switzerland, Greece and Turkey, headed for Tel Aviv. It also indicated how many hours and miles to go, what speed we were traveling, and even how cold it was outside (minus 77 F in the middle of the night!).

I pushed up the window blind after some hours of flight and marveled at an ink-black sky studded with huge stars! They seemed so close! Then, a few hours later, I peeked again and the sky was paler, with a copper-coloured horizon ahead, hinting at the sunrise to come. Having bid the sun goodbye in Toronto not that long beforehand, I really felt like we were in a race toward the new day.

Snow-capped mountains in Greece gave way to a thick blanket of cloud below as we continued eastward. Finally the clouds cleared and we got an excellent view of the sprawling city of Tel Aviv below before landing at Ben Gurion airport. It was great to feel the rush of fresh warm air entering the cabin when they opened the door of the plane!

We were bleary-eyed but otherwise fine as we approached the baggage carrousel. Once all our tour people were assembled, we boarded a bus that took us through Tel Aviv and northward along the coastline to Netanya, where we settled in our hotel rooms for some catch-up sleep. But not before we looked from our ninth-floor windows at the blue Mediterranean lapping at a wide strip of sandy beach where bathers paddled among the waves.