I arrived in Tel Aviv today. It was a pretty good flight considering it was 9+ hours. I lucked out and was able to move my seat from the very last row all the way up to the bulkhead row right behind Business Class. Lots of legroom and no one sat in the middle seat. Sweet! One interesting thing to note about flying into Israel - there is now a law that all passengers must be seated when they enter Israeli airspace, otherwise they are reported to Security and you get questioned when you get off the plane. The pilot makes an announcement about this and that in 15 minutes we would be entering Israeli territory and it takes 45 minutes before you land. Well, the line that formed for the bathroom wrapped around the plane. I think Continental needs to work on their communication process about this.
We got in around 9:30am and cruised through Baggage Claim and Customs. I expected a bit more from Security heading into the country, but I guess a bunch of old farts wearing USA clothes aren't much of a risk. Did I mention that it's HOT at 9:30am? It was already into the 90's at that hour. I am not looking forward to our games that start at 11am. We're only going to be in Tel Aviv for one night. Our accomodations weren't ready yet in Haifa (which is up in the North part of the country), so the Maccabiah people put us up in the main USA hotel here in Tel Aviv.
They gave each one of us our own suite. That was pretty nice. I ran into a lot of athletes from the past Games that I participated in. So it was a bit of a family reunion thing going on. Also met Bruce Pearl, the US Men's Basketball coach (and who happens to be the head coach of the University of Tennessee) and saw Jason Lezak. He's the Olympic Gold Medal swimmer who won one of the relays in the Beijing Games to help Michael Phelp's get his 7 medals. He chose to participate in these Maccabiah Games instead of the World Swimming Championships that are being held next week with the rest of the top swimmers in the world.
We had a light practice late this afternoon and then dinner. The schedule for tomorrow is to bus it up to Haifa at 8am so we can make our scheduled 10:15am practice time there. Check in to the hotel, lunch, and have another practice at 4pm. And that about wraps it up for Day 2.
We got in around 9:30am and cruised through Baggage Claim and Customs. I expected a bit more from Security heading into the country, but I guess a bunch of old farts wearing USA clothes aren't much of a risk. Did I mention that it's HOT at 9:30am? It was already into the 90's at that hour. I am not looking forward to our games that start at 11am. We're only going to be in Tel Aviv for one night. Our accomodations weren't ready yet in Haifa (which is up in the North part of the country), so the Maccabiah people put us up in the main USA hotel here in Tel Aviv.
They gave each one of us our own suite. That was pretty nice. I ran into a lot of athletes from the past Games that I participated in. So it was a bit of a family reunion thing going on. Also met Bruce Pearl, the US Men's Basketball coach (and who happens to be the head coach of the University of Tennessee) and saw Jason Lezak. He's the Olympic Gold Medal swimmer who won one of the relays in the Beijing Games to help Michael Phelp's get his 7 medals. He chose to participate in these Maccabiah Games instead of the World Swimming Championships that are being held next week with the rest of the top swimmers in the world.We had a light practice late this afternoon and then dinner. The schedule for tomorrow is to bus it up to Haifa at 8am so we can make our scheduled 10:15am practice time there. Check in to the hotel, lunch, and have another practice at 4pm. And that about wraps it up for Day 2.
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