Day 1 & 2 of Holy Land Trip

We left little Rock a little after noon on April 16th, traveling through Atlanta and New York to Tel Aviv.  For the most part, it was an uneventful trip.  We made all connections and arrived in Tel Aviv on April 17th around 5 pm.  Doris was faithful in doing her 'trip over' assignment, reading a book on the Holy Land. We had a large group of Jewish people on the plane, many of them Orthodox.  It  was interesting, to say the least, observing their religious behaviors.

Our guide, Moti was waiting at the airport for us.  All of our baggage arrived and we were off to spend the night in Tel Aviv before heading north on Thursday.  We did not have anything scheduled for the rest of the day other than getting to our hotel and catching up on our sleep (most of us had only a couple of hours sleep the past 24 hours.)

 

Joppa was not on our schedule of places to visit.  We were asking Moti some questions about Joppa and he said that we would be very near there and could stop for a short visit if we felt like it.  We quickly forgot about our tiredness and said "Why not?"

 

We stopped in Old Town Joppa and had a great view of Tel Aviv, which is right next to Joppa.  The place we are staying for the night is right behind these tall buildings.

We walked around for about one half hour, seeing St Peters Church and several other places and then headed for the hotel.  

We checked in and went for the buffet dinner.  Everyone had left the dining room except for Rodja, Joe and myself.  We were finishing up our meal when all of a sudden an 18 square inch ceiling tile came crashing down, landing in my plate and hitting me on the head and hand.  To our amazement there was a grown cat riding the ceiling tile down.  He must have been in the attic and jumped on to the tile causing it to break loose.  We did not expect to have entertainment with our meal.  

More tomorrow ...