It's All in the Getting There

“Aren’t you afraid to go to Israel?” a friend asked warily. 

 

I looked at this person who had never once thrown caution to the wind and wondered if she had any inkling of who she was talking to.

 

I’ve done a lot of scary things, not the least of it, playing an abundance of pickleball on two bionic knees, a 26-year-old fake hip, and psoriatic arthritis that makes every non-replaced bone in my body ache. I’ve hitchhiked, slept in questionable places, gone on vacation forgetting not only to lock the front door, but to pull it shut, drunk too much, and gotten into cars and conversations with unsavory humans. For heaven’s sake, I’ve peed in the Port Authority bathroom and gone on the last cruise ship out in March of 2020 as the rest of the world was days from shutting down. And those are just the things I’m admitting.

 

I am much more afraid of packing the wrong pair of shoes than dodging shrapnel on the streets of Tel Aviv. 

 

Which is why despite all the traveling I do, whenever it’s a week before departure and half my wardrobe is laid out on one of my kids’ empty beds, there’s always a small, shameful part of me that wouldn’t mind if the trip got canceled. It would be so much easier than making a decision about which suitcase to bring. 

 

My friend Claire has endured my pre-trip angst for almost 35 years and says the same thing every time. 

 

“It’s all in the getting there.” 

 

And she is so right. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a trip that was not worth it – once I got there. I spent New Year’s Eve in the USSR, back when St. Petersburg was Leningrad and Kyiv was Kiev and I had to keep the trip a secret from my Uncle Tony who would never forgive us if we visited a communist country. I borrowed money from my mother to pay off a credit card debt and added an extra thousand so I could join the neighborhood gang on a trip to France (I came clean before she died). I joined my sister on a business trip to Hong Kong, then on to Manila where I sang karaoke at a pig roast, sure the Filipinos wouldn’t notice I was off key since they didn’t sing English. I went to Mexico with a dozen girlfriends and lost two of them for three days to a couple of rich guys with a nice yacht. I went to folk festivals and slept under the stars, navigated the Skyline Drive on bald tires in the middle of the night, and counted on the kindness of truck drivers to help us when they eventually blew out. 

 

I've traveled to London for baseball, Rennes for Hearts, and Portugal with women I'd never met. I've cruised the Caribbean a dozen times with my buddy Patty and then once by myself after she died. I've walked on black sand in Costa Rica and even made it to Dayton, Ohio, for an Erma Bombeck writers' convention. Twice.

 

I’ve been a zillion places with lots of different people and personalities and I have never, not once, come home and said, I wish I hadn’t gone. 

 

But the lead-up is another story. I have yet to master the art of trusting my gut and traveling with a carry-on instead of a full-sized trunk. Apparently, I still haven't accepted that if my flip-flops fall apart or I dribble tomato sauce on my white sweater, there are stores in other countries. And Amazon.

 

World events can’t hold a candle to my personal perception of catastrophe. At least that’s how it’s always been. 

Until now. 

 

My son Leo married his partner in rhyme, Vio, in October 2025. They traveled around as the young and restless do, visiting Italy and India with a short stint in Nepal to renew their visas before heading back to her homeland of Israel where they plan to live. My ever-loving spouse and I had tickets in hand and Airbnbs booked with a plan to meet the newlyweds in Afula in April. But the conflict with Iran, which apparently wasn't officially a war, got our flights canceled. So we pivoted and went to Los Angeles to see the other son instead.

 

This trip looked like smooth sailing until my ever-sensible spouse started spewing about renewed nonsense with Iran. Ordinarily, talk like that would make me start looking on the bright side. If things do indeed escalate and we can’t go, I can pick up some pickleball games, play canasta on Wednesday, go to that church meeting on Thursday, have two free weekends, and stop agonizing over which of my three pairs of black pants deserve to see Israel.

 

But not this time.

 

 I haven’t seen Leo and Vio in over a year, which is the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing one of my kids. 

 

I want to see the balcony where they do their downward dogs, eat their homemade hummus, walk their city streets, communicate with Vio’s family without knowing each other’s language, and see enough of their everyday lives so I can picture them there once I’m back home in the good old USA. 

 

No, I’m not afraid to go to Israel. I’m afraid of not being able to go.