Air travel to the Holy Land

Our plane was scheduled to leave at 10: AM on March 17 (Thursday), so we got to the airport about 7:30 and met Father Alex, who gave us our yellow hats, name tags, and Pilgrim Packets. I volunteered to carry the "prayer sack" containing prayer petitions, to be set in front of each altar where we heard Mass. The first leg of the trip was to Atlanta; the second was to JFK in New York. No problem here, but when we got to New York, Father Alex wanted us to attend mass in the chapel at JFK. We had to change terminals, which meant walking and walking, and going through security twice. Because of Lyle's total knee replacement, he was patted down twice. After all that, we had little time to grab a bite before boarding the plane for Tel Aviv. However, we hit a snag here. We were supposed to board at 9:00 PM. Instead, because of an electrical failure on the Delta flight, we waited in line for 1 1/2 hours. When the repairs were supposedly fixed, we had to go through security again -- another pat-down plus an X-ray for Lyle. After boarding the plane, we waited for the plane to taxi out, but found that the problem wasn't fixed, and we had to go back again to the gate! We finally got off the ground around 11 PM. I was able to sleep just a bit on the 11 hour flight. We got in around 4 PM -- three hours later than scheduled. We set our watches seven hours ahead to match Tel Aviv time. We happened to get in the wrong line at Passport Check and were the last to show up at the meeting place in the Tel Aviv airport. Then we got on the bus and left for Bethlehem!