Advertisement
Published: June 28th 2018
Edit Blog Post
After months of planning we were on our way to the Galapagos Islands. A year earlier Don's niece had announced her wedding event would take place in a Mexican resort. We looked at maps and decided this was our chance for a family holiday trip to explore Galapagos 'on the way' to the wedding.
Don organised the Galapagos tour and all the flights for us from our home in Israel and for our daughter in England. More details about our foursome and the routings later. This blog post focusses on our,departure from Tel Aviv and our first stop before connecting with our daughter in Houston.
This year's adventure really began for us on Tuesday 24 April when we drove to TLV airport to board the Boeing 787 Dreamliner bound nonstop for San Francisco. What a plane! It was very comfortable and quiet but the plug sockets were behind us and you had to be Houdini to reach them. We had a window and an aisle seat. Once the beds were in place, the person in the window seat (Don) had to either jump over me, wake me or have a very strong bladder if he needed the loo. Fortunately
because of his gym training (thanks Torey), Don was able to jump over me. The plane took off on time and at 00:55 Wednesday 25 April the adventure started. We were offered pyjamas and slippers as well as the usual goody bag. We declined the pj's but used the slippers. The bed was extremely comfortable, and a good eight hours sleep was enjoyed on the nearly 16-hour flight.
We landed at SFO about 45 minutes before the scheduled 6 am arrival that same Wednesday. Did we have a time turner, like Hermione in Harry Potter? Unfortunately US customs did not open until 6 am so we had to simply sit on the plane for over half an hour. Then we were first off the plane and scooted down to US immigration which we cleared in moments. As we reached the luggage carousel we could see our small overflow case. But after an hour we realized we weren't going to see the other two main cases. Don was told by the baggage information desk that they had been held up at Ben Gurion airport for security reasons and missed the flight. We have already had suggestions on Facebook what those
could be by our "well meaning" friends. But at the end of the day - who knows why it was our cases?!?! Thankfully we always carry two days spare clothes in our hand luggage - we highly recommend this.
We then went to the arrivals lounge and had a long, hot shower. It felt like probably the best shower ever! We were then able to make contact with Don's cousins, Art and Joanne who were hosting us overnight. They live in Alto Paulo Hills. Their beautiful ranch house is nestled high up on a hill surrounded by greenery. Many birds and animals small and large nest around or pass by. But we never saw the deer.
There were two points to this stopover south of San Francisco. We really did want to spend a little personal time with Art & Joanne, whom we had only met the previous year when we enjoyed a day together in the north of Israel. And secondly we determined that our bodies would not tolerate 30+ hours of travel on a series of three flights, so we split our outbound journey in half.
Art graciously collected us from the airport while Joanne prepared a nice brunch. After recovering and having some considerable catch-up chat we went for a long walk up and down the quiet roads around their place, looking at the "look-at-me" monstrosities that were once quite modest ranch houses. The largest of these was perched high up on a hill with terraced gardens, obviously copied from the Baha'i Temple in Haifa, Israel. This house is owned by a Russian oligarch! Oh the world of Silicon Valley high tech...
We came back to the house for lunch and a late afternoon snooze. Our bodies - not to mention our minds - were 10 hours displaced from our base timezone, with more back & forth shifts ahead. Then dinner and more chat and ultimately to bed as we had a pretty early start tomorrow.
.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.176s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 13; qc: 53; dbt: 0.094s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb