Almost There

After spending the last few months studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the myriad of complicating layers that await us when we land in Tel Aviv, we have been preparing as a team to hold our plans loosely—to come to terms with the fact that much throughout the week will feel chaotic and our agendas are more flimsy than fully formed. We had accepted and were ready to embrace this reality in Israel, we just didn’t expect to experience it on our way.

Perhaps it was naive of me to assume that our travel itineraries would go off without a hitch, especially with how infamous the reliability of international traveling can be, but we have stumbled our way towards Israel. Despite our intentions of skipping from Minneapolis to Chicago to Newark to Tel Aviv, we have instead tripped from Minneapolis to Chicago and overshot Newark by about thousand or so miles and ended up in Germany. Yes, we are in Germany—Frankfurt to be exact. 

At the risk of boring the uninterested trip follower to death with an overdramatic rant, let me pass along a few of our travel woes from yesterday...or was it today? Fog. My mind is a fog.

When we arrived in Chicago yesterday, each of us were flagged in the system for informational error or another (for example, United was convinced from the paperwork that Debbie was a male. Thankfully, after much dialogue and careful reasoning, we were able to convince them that she indeed was not). Our biggest challenge came, however, not with proving that Debbie was a female or that Maddie’s birthday was indeed this past week, but instead with Chad Amour and the incorrect middle name that he’d been assigned. While apparently this oversight wasn’t a serious enough infraction to keep Chad from flying from Minneapolis to Chicago, we were told that if we were to proceed, while they might let Chad into Israel there's a high chance that he will not be allowed to fly back home when all is said in done. Because we love Chad and despise the idea of an America without him, we pressed and hit the phones for the next hour or so. After getting a hold of the White House and the United Nations (and by that I mean a supervisor at Cheap Air and Paul Tshihamba), we were able to clarify the matter and move on. 

For the sake of giving credit where credit is due, let me acknowledge how amazing the women at United's customer service were. They rallied their troops, endured the persecution of an angsty growing line, and stuck in the fight with us to make sure that our favorite filmmaker made it to Israel. Out of the overflow of his heart, Chad then compensated each of the heroines with a warm hug, a gift that I’m sure will forever alter the course of their lives. I’ve been told that everything in life changes when Chad wraps his arms around you. New colors suddenly seem to emerge.

Shortly after that storm found it’s calm, our flight to Newark got bumped which means that we would no longer land in time to catch our flight to Tel Aviv which is why we are now in Frankfurt, Germany, where we have been sitting for the past 5 hours waiting for our flight to Tel Aviv to finally take off and no one can remember what it feels like to smile. Annie came close to cracking a grin, but I think she was wincing.

Despite all of this, the morale seems high and we are all pretty excited that we will be in Israel shortly. 

Stay tuned as the journey continues to unfold.