November 15th

The period of sleep deprivation was fitful with little sleep obtained by either of us.  There's always something going on around the plane - a young infant requiring attention, a mild medical issue behind us, etc.

The somewhat sleep deprived, and yet still a nerd engineer, managed to figure out how to turn off the very "touchy" touch sensitive screens on the plane quickly, how to bend the seat headrest into a u-ish shape to cradle the head and to move the headrest so it actually cradled the head rather than the top of his back, and "raise" and "lower" the electronic shades that allowed you to "open" the shade in the morning.

Dawn arrived as we made landfall over France this morning.  I was able to capture these pictures over the wing of the aircraft.  The Dreamliner aircraft utilizes carbon-fibre reinforced polymer materials for its wings which permits the wing flex which helps to dampen turbulence,

The view from our cabin window to the wing tip.

The view forward over the huge right hand engine.

A view of the cloud formations somewhere over the Mediterranean.

We landed at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv at about 2:30 p.m. local time.  The late arrival, caused by the security delays at Toronto, did not bode well for the rest of our experience at the airport.

Grace surveying one of the long corridors in Ben Gurion Airport after disembarking a few minutes earlier.

By the time we made it to customs it looked like this - long lines of people waiting to go through Passport Control at the Airport.  It took us over an hour to get through the lineups at the portals, while some took close to two hours.  To make matters more interesting were a handful of the group were missing their checked baggage.  One wise couple had thought ahead and they both shared each other's luggage.  As a result, they had 50% of their luggage between both of them rather than 100% of the luggage with one spouse, and 0% with the other spouse.  This led to further delays as the unlucky individuals had to notify the airline and get a trace on the luggage.

Passengers waiting to go through customs.

Consequently, by the time we finally made it out of the airport it was after 4:30.  This meant that the activity planned for the afternoon - going to Mount Carmel near Haifa where the prophet Elijah faced off against the prophets of Baal thousands of years ago and celebrating Mass there was cancelled.  One of the contributors to the delay may have been the Shabbat beginning at sundown which typically leads to some delays for flights coming in on Friday afternoon.

We arrived at our hotel in Haifa around 6:15.  We were able to go to our rooms for about half an hour before going to dinner in the hotel dining room.  It was quite the banquet with a large assortment of meats, fishes, salads, breads, and desserts.  Here's a couple of pictures of the spread...

Finally, here's a view outside our window from our hotel, built on a hillside, looking over Haifa.

Good night from Haifa!

As a comparison, here's the same view from our window just before dawn (6:07 AM local time) the next morning.