Day 1: Traveling to the Holy Land

We’ve always dreamed of taking this trip. So when the opportunity presented itself, we couldn’t help but say yes. It was about 8 months ago when Dr. Hannah, one of JT’s favorite professors, said that he leads a trip every year to Israel and he would love it if we would come. After much consideration and number crunching (p.s. it’s not cheap to go overseas), we decided to go, thinking we might never get the chance again.

Dr. Hannah has lead this same trip every summer for the last 20+ years, however the itinerary for each group varies from year to year. This keeps it fresh and new not only for the Hannahs, but for the entire group as well.

13 days. Wow. We’ve never gone on a trip for 13 days. That’s almost two weeks! We left DFW on Thursday around noon and arrived in Tel-Aviv on Friday at 5pm. There’s this awkwardness of traveling with a group who is mostly from the same city as you. You’ve never met these people, yet you see them at every checkpoint along the way. After a while you notice that you both are giving weird glances at each other and silently thinking “are you going the same place I’m going?”.  Once our second set of tour sponsors shows up at our layover in Philadelphia, we all get introduced and then the 11 hour flight ahead of us isn’t so bad.

Once on board, we snap a few pics and take our sleeping pills so that we can get adjusted to the new time zone. Jetlag is never fun.

Did I mention that we had to sit and taxi over an hour and a half? Yeah, let’s make that flight 12.5 hours please. Yuck. But the good news is we arrived safely, everyone’s bags showed up, we took a group picture just to provide the proof.

Once through customs we had a 2 hour bus ride ahead of us through beautiful contry-side on our way to our hotel at the Dead Sea. Once we arrived it was time for a quick bite for dinner and then a good night sleep. Tomorrow’s gonna be a full day, so get some sleep y’all!