Home and knitting on planes

I am home, safe and sound. Spending about 20 hours in planes wasn't fun, but I survived. The second leg of my trip was delayed a couple hours because when they loaded the plane the cabin was as hot as a sauna. The captain announced that it didn't seem smart to fly across the country (from NY to CA) with the cabin at 95 degrees, but they left us sitting in the hot plane for 90 minutes while they tried to fix it. My body didn't like it. I had already sat in a plane for over 12 hours! And, by the time we got in the air (luckily, with a working air conditioning system) the flight held over 6 more hours of constrained movement and mediocre movies.

I had one consolation: I was knitting. That's right! I knit on an overseas, transcontinental flight. Not only that, but I was on El Al, the Israeli airline with a reputation extreme strictness. I was restrained and didn't try to knit during the strange sleepy time-warp that was my trip to Tel Aviv. But, by my trip back, restraint was gone. Of course, I am using rather unthreatening needles for my current project--US size 8 wooden double pointed--so I didn't really expect any logical person to be threatened by my knitting. And I was right! I was randomly selected for my carry on baggage to be searched twice in the Tel Aviv airport, and no one cared about the needles, or anything else in my bag really.

Now I am home. My husband and my cat are both happy to see me, and life is returning to its normal frantic pace. But, you know what else is special about being back:

Home = Iced Mocha!!!

That's right, there are no iced mochas in Israel, or at least I couldn't find any. There is a drink Israelis call an iced mocha, but it is not the same. An Israeli iced mocha is a very sweet blended drink that circulates in a kind of slurpee machine--a sort of prefrozen frappuccino concoction. I spent one day on a mission for an iced mocha: I looked at multiple coffee shops, I tried asking for a "mocha with ice," and I explained exactly how to make one. Yet, everywhere I went they looked at me like was crazy.

I had a really wonderful time, but it's good to be back.