I've never been so excited or so nervous about a trip in my life. Living in Europe we travel all the time, but this trip was different. First off, it was expensive. . . the most expensive trip we've ever taken. Second, we were flying to the middle east. Not only is it extremely difficult to get permission for military to go there, but while you're there you know you're not in the safest place. We had to get several permissions & signatures to be able to go which took months, but we got them.
Even with all the safety concerns for Israel, we felt at peace going & were excited to walk in the footsteps of our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ. It was going to be an amazing adventure!
Our trip started out with a midnight wake up call. You read that right, MIDNIGHT!
We went to bed at 6:00pm so we could try to get SOME sleep before our day of travels. Our alarms went off at midnight & we all got up & got ready to go. We left the house at 1:30am with all 5 kids, 5 suitcases, 7 backpacks, & 7 extremely sleepy people. We drove about 2 hours to the Baden-Baden/Karlsruhe airport. We arrived right at 3:30am. It was snowing like crazy & when we finally parked at the airport, we had to carry our luggage (not roll it) through the snow drifts to the airport.
It was freezing & we couldn't wait to get inside. Ryanair told us we needed to be 3 hours early for flights to the Middle East so we made it right at 3:30 only to find out the airport doesn't open until 4:30am. There was one sliding door that was open to a small walkway leading into the main airport entrance. The walkway was meant for just a handful of people, but like us, everyone on our flight got there at 3:30 like we were told. We crammed a good 30 people & their luggage into that walkway area where we basically huddled together to keep warm (& awake).
At 4:30am, the airport officially opened & we could go inside. We all crammed into the Ryanair line like cattle (like always) & made it through the check in line just fine to check our luggage. Security wasn't too bad either. If there is one advantage to these early early flights, it's being the only people at the airport so it's not overly busy.
Next we made our way to passport control. This is where our first "adventure" of the trip happened. For some reason, when we visited London back in July, the port at Calais, France stamped our passports with the date "July 34, 2022" which obviously doesn't exist. Coming back, we entered Dunkirk rather than Calais & Dunkirk DIDN'T stamp our passport. Now, we've traveled to several other countries since July including Morocco & nobody has ever noticed this our pointed it out to us, but of course TODAY the polizei wanted to know when we entered France again, why the date was wrong, why we didn't have it fixed yet, & in the end decided to take away our passports. (and the panic begins.). The Polizei got on the phone & started calling the Calais Port looking for proof we were on the ship or that the stamp wasn't fabricated. They didn't have any record of us which made things worse. Luckily, Trek was able to pull up our ferry tickets to London from Calais & from London to Dunkirk on his phone so we could somewhat prove why we were there, when we were there, & allowed them to talk to Calais to find out why their stamp said "July 34, 2022." It turned out that the Calais port had messed up their stamp & every single person on that ferry that day had the wrong stamp in their passports.
Anyway, long story short. . . they took our whole family into the polizei station there in the airport, made a bunch of phone calls to prove WHEN we entered France & then WHY we entered Germany & WHY we didn't have a stamp for entering Germany. (We had to prove we lived here as military members. Thank heavens I ALWAYS carry bills with our address on them, military orders, & our SOFA cards proving residency.). Once they got that all sorted out, he cancelled out the stamp for Calais, added a bunch of numbers proving that he was qualified to cancel it, restamped it FOR Calais, then FINALLY gave us the thumbs up to go to Tel Aviv. He told us that if they didn't fix it here, we would have probably been trapped in Israel & it would have a been a whole lot harder to fix it there than it was to fix it here in Germany. So it ended up being a blessing in disguise. It was a good thing we got to the airport early because the whole process took forever.
We made it to the gate & even onto our plane to Tel Aviv. I got to sit by Canyon & Craiger this time. Lorien, Taya, Bladen, & Trek all had to sit by strangers.
Then we got the news that we couldn't leave until they de-iced the plane. They told us it would take about 20 minutes. They lied. It took over 2 hours to do it. We were now 2 hours delayed.
The flight itself wasn't too bad. I had a little girl behind me that insisted on kicking my seat the entire 4 hour flight, but it wasn't too bad. Craiger & I played war for a lot of the flight. And all 3 of us read books which is always fun. But after sitting on that plane for over 6 hours, we were SO happy to land in Tel Aviv & get out to stretch our legs.
Navigating the Tel Aviv airport wasn't bad at all. It was a beautiful airport & we were able to get through passport control easily. We each got an Israel visa as we arrived as well.
Our guide Salim Musallam was great. We had a wonderful driver named Hannah (or John). He picked up our crew of 3 families on a bus & started driving us to Galilee. We found out that we were the lucky group of our bigger group. One of the other families' flights got cancelled & they had to reschedule for another flight that would arrive at 4am the next day. Another family's flight had to get a new crew & delayed them until midnight. The other 2 families flights were delayed 3 hours so they wouldn't arrive until 7 or 8pm. We felt lucky we still made it by 1pm.
We drove for a while through the Israel countryside & stopped by a rest stop along the road to grab a quick lunch. Nobody there spoke English, so we just ordered food & hoped for the best. I wound up with a lamb pita almost like a döner kebap in Germany. It was good. Trek had falafel. The kids had pizza. It was then that we realized how expensive food was going to be in Israel. My pita was $25 American money. In Germany I pay $3-4 for a döner. The pizza was $12 a slice so the kids had to share a few slices. Luckily our tour covered all breakfasts & dinners so we only had to worry about paying for lunches.
Samill dropped us off at Hotel Restal in Tiberias where they greeted us with home squeezed orange juice & welcomed us to their hotel. They were very kind, spoke wonderful English, & really wanted to make our stay wonderful. We had 3 rooms all next to each other. The boys got to be together, the girls got to be together, & then Trek & I got our own room. It was really nice. Most of the kids wanted to rest until dinner, but Trek, Bladen, & I wanted to go see something so we walked down to the Sea of Galilee from our hotel. It was only a 10 minute walk.
After enjoying our walk we made it back in time for dinner which was a buffet style dinner with middle eastern foods. They always had lots of boiled or fried potatoes, hummas, salads, veggies, pickled EVERYTHING (onions, cabbage, cucumbers, cauliflower, carrots, you name it, they pickle it), meats, & fruit. It was really really good & the kids liked that you can pick & choose what you eat. They weren't super in love with middle eastern food, but they ate it. They always liked the different meats & potatoes & the dessert table was always delicious.
After dinner, I got a notification on my phone that someone had charged $5200.00 to my credit card buying tickets to the world cup in Qatar. "Adventure #2" of the day had begun. I spent my evening on the phone with the credit card company trying to get my card cancelled & refunded for the purchase. They were very nice & were able to fix it, but now I didn't have my credit card to buy ANYTHING on this trip.
Overall, we had some hiccups the first day, but we still made it, loved being in Israel, & couldn't wait to start exploring it.
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