The Trip Out

Well, it is high time to update the website. Hannah has held me back from filling it up with excrutiating detail of every leg of the trip so far... considering we have just started.

In short, the drive down from Seattle to Santa Cruz went better than could be expected. We stayed with Ilana and Steve and Caitlin in Portland. They've got a very cute little place that they're working on as a sort of lifetime hobby. Ilana happened to be celebrating her birthday, which we celebrated over omelettes, and we heard about Steve's volunteering at freegeek.org. A very cool-sounding outfit. I encourage everyone to check them out.

We were teased by promises of a sunny south but got a deluge of rain. We stayed with Robyn at Wilbur Hot Springs, which is now just a bit harder to reach, down a rutted and nearly washed-out dirt road. The place is as calming as ever and Robyn was kind enough to find us a plush room and cooked a fabulous breakfast. Afterour usual dawdling, we made it to Arn's place in Marin and he was game for rolling into SF to meet up with Hannah's Santa Cruz schoolmates. Arn and I let the girls do their thing while we dropped by Krzysztof's place. Nice pad in the city. Man.... a block from the mighty Ocean Beach, in the cool and quiet part of SF. We managed some dim sum before meeting back up with Hannah and crashing back in Marin.

We finally made our way to Santa Cruz. Through more torrential rainstorms, winds that threatened to blow over our little truck (thank god we left the kayaks in Seattle) and multiple highway closures that forced us to backtrack. To think we haven't even left the country.

Anyhoo, a lovely Seder, a bit of surf and lots of trip prep. We got ourselves onto a plane and then settled into acouple or more long flights. Hurrah to BA for treating people like customers instead of cows to the meatpacking plant. Sadly, tragically, we weren't able to make our connection in Heathrow, a terrible airport by the way and you'll thank me if you avoid passing through that place, and had to endure an extra seven hours of stale airport air.

So, suddenly we find ourselves at 5am local time in the new, improved, swanky Ben-Gurion airport. It looks strange to me, this new yuppie Israel. Hip, global,wealthy, it's such a contrast to the news which features regularly and almost exclusively the continuing violence and the miserable conditions ofthe Palestinians. But, let us leave this for now. Ofer very kindly picked us up and luckily had a van. It's a miracle but all our baggage, including the bike boxes arrived with us. Baruch haShem :) Now to see if the bikes survived...

We've slept. Hung out with Ofer and Ginat, and the children, Leor, Noam, Yuval and a little shy boy. We've put together Hannah's bike, played a little basketball and settled into dinner with Assaf andNirit who live only a few blocks away. They also have a wonderful boy, Royi and a baby girl, Daniel. Everywhere, children and growing famillies. Wonderful, a little noisy but fun. Today, we'll see. We all go to Haifa for Noemi's birthday. First though, Hannah and I will bike to Caesarea and meet up with Ofer and fam. Our bike wheels didn't survive unscathed so we'll stop by a shop on our way and see what can be done.