Poland Spring and Sausage.

I finally made it back to the US! It was looking doubtful for a while there because traveling out of Israel is always a challenge.

It started when Miriam, who had a morning flight yesterday, texted me this: "Houston, we may have a problem." She went on to tell me that there was some labor dispute at the airport and she was waiting on the runway. She was concerned that all the flights would be canceled for the day. (Mine was supposed to leave later that night.) But after a couple of hours the labor dispute was over and they were on their way.

I got to the airport 3 hours before my flight. After the security people took everything out of my large suitcase and shoved it back in, I got chosen to go through the "special security line," which was the same line I had to go through on my way to Istanbul. In this line they take everything out of your carry-on bags and wipe the items down with a cloth that they then run through some machine to make sure there are no strange substances detected. Everything was fine in this special line until the girl in front of me was suddenly surrounded by four security guards with earpieces in and everything. It turns out she had a bullet in her bag that an IDF soldier had given to her. Fail.

To make a long story short, I barely made my flight even though I got to the airport 3 hours early.

Always an adventure!

So, I am sitting in Philadelphia now waiting for my connecting flight to Nashville. I stopped off at Au Bon Pain and got myself some good old American Poland Spring water and a sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich on an asiago cheese bagel. Yummy to my tummy.

As I'm eating I'm chatting on gchat with Miriam, who is also back in the US for a couple of weeks, and we are talking about the little things we miss about living in the US. She said this: "dude. i just had raspberries on my cereal while reading the target ad. remember target?" I laughed out loud in the middle of the airport when I read this. I told her I am definitely going to make some target runs and in between these I am going to eat an insane amount of steak.

Ah, home sweet home. :)

What's so cool about being back in the US though is that at the end of my stay here I'm pretty sure I'll be homesick for Tel Aviv. That's a really good thing.