Israel trip - heading home

Wake up call at the ungodly hour of 3:30 am, but the hotel concierge brought us juice, coffee and cookies to help.  Quick drive to the airport and then the waiting began - we had to take our check bags through security:


We couldn't find breakfast at the airport, so the kids had burgers from Burger Ranch and Bobbie had a tuna sandwich from a coffee kiosk (I ate a now stale GF bagel that I had brought along).  Our travails were rewarded - we finally got to sit in Business class on our first leg, to London.  Breakfast tasted especially delicious with all that extra leg room.

But during the second, longer leg, we were back in Economy, and it felt extra bitter after our brief experience of luxury.  We weren't even sitting together, and the man next to me would not trade seats with Larry - a rare case of someone immune his charm.

We blearily unloaded at JFK into a brutally long customs line.  After about half an hour, a harassed looking clerk called for US passport holders and we walked around the line, which was even longer than we had initially realized.  We ended up at this window, which I found hilarious:



Then we met our airport van driver, Steve, who was as delightful as we remembered.  Most of us crashed out immediately, after over 20 hours of travel:

We all went right to bed when we got back to NJ, 23 hours after we woke up in Tel Aviv, and we awoke relatively refreshed on Friday.  We loaded up Larry's car and headed back to Syracuse; Matt left right behind us, on his way back to school.