Jet Lagged

First there was just the fact that I needed to write a blog post. After all, I had a lot to write about. It was summer in Arizona. That's always seemed to lend itself to a lot of whining.

But then, when mulling over vacation spots, I somehow convinced Husband to run wild and free and farther than he'd ever gone before. We suddenly booked four flights to Israel. With two weeks notice.

I could still have written a blog post, but then again, we only had flights booked. We had no place to stay. Can I even try to count how many nights I sat in my office instead of working, with one web browser up with a Google map of Tel Aviv, another of Jerusalem and yet another with Vacation Rentals in Israel?

There were the flights: seventeen hours there and eighteen hours back. There was the jet lag, a day on the way there and a week long after we got back. There was the crazy, mixed-up, beautiful insanity of being in Israel, of going on tours with our guide driving around hairpin turns with a Jewish Bible in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. There was my broken hair straightener, which led to me being assumed for Israeli everywhere we went, with my gigantic head of something almost resembling hair. There was the moment the four of us were crammed into a minuscule grocery store, frantically trying to buy food for the Sabbath, and staring at the all Hebrew packaging around us. We had no idea what anything was. There was standing at the Western Wall, with women all scrambling for a spot to talk to God, standing there crying, one next to another.

And just when I was figuring things out, just when the money wasn't looking like play money to me any longer and I could actually figure out what the change was in my wallet, just when the sounds around me started to sound familiar - like language - we left.

How was your summer vacation? Have you ever been on a vacation and left a piece of yourself there?

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This week Kristen over at Motherese has posted a book review of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie and will post an interview with me tomorrow. She is also giving away a copy of the book, the winner will be drawn from those who leave comments. Please head over there!