Friday morning. We went to Carrie’s book club last night, but I could barely concentrate, although they started with a bit that mentioned Caesarea Philippi, which gave us (more accurately Dot) an opportunity to expand and enthuse. I’m sleeping quite well, but my stomach is not quite back to normal, and nor is Dot’s. We have heard of a couple of other people from the pilgrimage with stomach upsets…

Back to the Israel trip…

Surprisingly I felt well enough on the Sunday to continue with the tour, which just goes to show that Imodium works, or maybe it was the other stuff kindly brought to me by Damon, a very nice vicar from Lowestoft. Or both. Anyway, I had an early breakfast and suffered no ill-effects; so in cold and windy weather I joined the bus, which left later than usual. Too late, in fact, because we reached the morning Eucharist at St George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem after it had started, and we poured in during the sermon, which was in either Hebrew or Arabic, probably the latter. Because of the embarrassment and haste I found myself sitting behind a pillar, which wasn’t perfect. We filed forward to take the wafers, but there was no wine distributed because of the coronavirus panic, which had reached Israel. We had some nice mint tea or coffee afterwards with members of the congregation and pilgrims from other places, such as Exeter.

Afterwards we had a bit of a wait for the bus driver, who had been given the wrong timings, then drove to John the Baptist’s birthplace, which also had a spring. Dot did a reading here, and afterwards we declined the opportunity to embark on another climb (I was advised not to in my weakened state, but wasn’t going to anyway) and had a lovely lunch with Anne and James. This consisted largely of a cooked camembert, which may not sound the right thing to eat after diarrhoea, but it didn’t seem to do any harm. It did make us late back to the bus, though – a misunderstanding over time. There was a lot of that.

We then drove to the Holocaust Museum, which unsurprisingly contained far too much to take in in the time allowed – 90 minutes. Need to return really, but my stomach is voting against it. One of our number got lost on the way back to the bus. She looked lost all the time, actually, but most of the time she wasn’t. Back at the hotel we had evening prayer and reminiscences, and then we had a chat in the bar with Anne, James and Audrey, who is from Northern Ireland. Anne had some whisky she wanted us to finish, but I resisted the temptation.

This is where my notes run out, but I seem to remember that on the Monday we left fairly early and drove to Abu Ghosh, which is not an Indian menu item but a Benedictine monastery and church which is reckoned to be a possible site of the meeting on the road to Emmaus, and so a fitting last stop before Tel Aviv. We had a Communion service and handed in our headsets. The weather was very pleasant.

At Tel Aviv we had an interesting problem before reaching the Departure area. Unfortunately I can’t tell you what it was in case this is accessed online by someone other than my two usual readers. Suffice to say that two people gave slightly different versions of where we had been, which for some reason alarmed the security staff. (It was harder to get out of Israel than to get in.) Anyway, we made it through all right, having jettisoned our water bottles unnecessarily (they don’t worry about taking liquids through).

We had sandwiches with James and Anne and then wandered round in the rather nice Departure area before making our way to Gate E8. Then, after the usual delays in boarding and taxi-ing (Dot changed with Damon again so that we could sit together) we took off and, eventually, landed at Luton, where the bus was waiting. The Easyjet cabin crew were excellent, but the toilet facilities very poor (two toilets for nearly 200 people over five hours). I also would have liked some information about the countries we were flying over, but no.

We got back to Norwich around 10.10pm, which gave us time to walk through the Close and get through the gate before it shut at 10.30pm. Budgens was shut, but Dot went to the Co-op at the station and picked up some essentials, like bread. We went to sleep pretty quickly.