Travel Day

Travel day- so many things going on. The day starts early in New Jersey where we leave the suburbs and wind through the endless New York traffic on our way to JFK Airport. I remark "The most challenging art of the day is over".

We are given semi VIP treatment where we meet our team captain Brian, who directs us to the proper  stops for security and triplicate passport checking.

Along the way we get our good luck Tefilim by an Israeli Chabad.








Bomb sniffing dogs are ubiquitous but we eventually get to our gate. My first task is to find all of our players, one of whom doesn't have a phone. His mother had called me earlier to please make sure her talented teenage son was safe and at the right gate.

I put her (and my) mind at ease when I located him finding one of his newly found teammates in a floor game of blitz.



I made sure everyone was ready t board-all except one. First mess up of the day. I get to my airplane seat and find my old body has to make due in the center. I first speak to a young man on the window. His name is Mike, a 24 year old golfer from Michigan whose other passion is sky diving. When I tell him that I am the chess coach, he asks me if that is one of my players sitting in the aisle seat. My face turns ashen as I realize I had totally forgotten about Kevin our other Floridian! I had been so preoccupied in finding our phoneless player that I had forgotten about Kevin.

I punished myself for this error, but was relieved that he had no problem negotiating the airport. We had a nice discussion about chess and other things. I am not able to stay in my seat for such a long flight and with 135 Maccabiah competitors on the flight, I had numerous interesting conversations including a long one about youth sports with golf coach Peter Epstein.

I was amazed at how each golfer lugged their full set of clubs with them. Kevin and I later went over some chess games from my Chessbase database and he greatly impressed me at how accurately he found the right move in numerous high level games.

With the flight winding down and a new day suddenly approaching because of the push ahead in time we were served a wonderful Israeli breakfast at 8 pm according to our Eastern clock but 2 am in Israel.

We transitioned from the lain to a successful landing at Ben Gurion Airport and it was on to the trip through the airport and buses that would eventually take us to our hotel-te Prima Link in Petah Tikva.

We were greeted by our wonderful on site hostess Juliet-a Godsend for a tired group and Coach in a new land.



More later. Sleep beckons. It feels so much like Sunday