Once again, I write to you with my knees jammed against my chest, from the comfort of El Al Economy, as Bernice and I make our way across the Mediterranean to Lisbon.

Actually, we’re quite relieved that Bernice is sitting in her window seat, because, for a brief period yesterday, it was touch and go whether she would be sitting there, or, indeed, anywhere on the plane. At 1:45 yesterday afternoon, an email from El Al dropped into my inbox, informing me that I could now check in online for today’s flight. All went smoothly until it came to filling in Bernice’s passport details, when I noticed – goodness knows how, but how fortunate that I did – that I had made the booking for a Mrs Bernice Browmnstein, with a rogue interloper ‘m’.

Pausing only to panic fleetingly, I attempted to amend the spelling. However, this proved impossible. I realised that I had to get the ticket reissued under Bernice’s correct name, as it appears on her passport. A link on the check-in page opened a WhatsApp dialog for me, allowing me to bang my head against a brick bot, who offered me a generous menu to choose from. Unfortunately, ‘Correct a Misspelled Name’ was not one of the options.

When I attempted to explain to the bot what I needed, it chastised me for an unrecognisable response, and gaily repeated its list of options. Eventually, I accepted defeat, and chose the closest option to what I wanted: ‘Cancel your booking’. I must admit that I chose this with a certain amount of trepidation, fearing that the bot might take me at my word and blithely cancel our booking and then ask whether there was anything else it could help me with today.

Fortunately, it chose instead to inform me that cancellation was, as it were, above its payscale, and it was transferring me to a human agent. A follow-up message informed me that my request was being queued and the agent would strike up a conversation as soon as possible.

I decided that it was worth opening an assault on a second front, since the clock was ticking, so I phoned El Al’s customer support service. After I had made a ‘fairly close’ selection from another menu that didn’t offer me what I wanted, I heard the usual three rings, followed by muzak, followed by a message informing me that I was 40^th in the queue, and the waiting time was estimated to be 30 minutes. A minute later, I was offered the option to request a callback and hang up. I accepted the offer, only to be informed, after my acceptance was accepted, that my call would be returned within 24 hours. Since that window potentially took us beyond our departure time, I decided that call back was not such an attractive option, and immediately called again, to discover bad and good news: I was now 44^th in the queue, but the waiting time was still only 30 minutes. Clearly, I thought, a new shift of agents had started, who were some 10% more efficient than the workers they had replaced.

Over the next 20 minutes, I received repeated updates, as my place in the queue progressed healthily from 44 to 40, then 36, then 32. However, slightly less healthily, the expected waiting time remained constant at 30 minutes, and I began to realise that this was not quite as sophisticated an algorithm as I had at first imagined.

It was, therefore, a very pleasant surprise when, 20 minutes in, a very pleasant gentleman answered the phone, immediately understood my problem, saw the error online, asked me to email him a photo of Bernice’s passport, and confirmed that he had requested a reissuing of the ticket. 50 minutes later, he called me again, to inform me that the ticket had been reissued with the spelling corrected, and I could now check in, which I did, with much relief. It would have been such a pain to have to unpack the suitcases just to take out the two items Bernice was taking with for herself.

I am taking this whole experience as an indication that I have become a little too blasé about international travel, and I need to be rather more in the moment when making arrangements in future.

Needless to say, all of this excitement got the adrenaline flowing, and helped us through the last stages of working through our checklist for Portugal. Since we were flying on a Monday, we had many last-minute things to do on Sunday. This was even truer than usual, since this last Shabbat was my brother-in-law David’s 80^th birthday, and the family celebrations had stretched from 11AM on Friday till after Shabbat. By the time we arrived home we were all partied out and not really up to confronting the checklist.

So, Sunday was quite a busy day! However, we managed to get everything done. We found ourselves left with little enough excess fruit to make the bag we hung on our neighbour’s front door not embarrassingly large. All the other leftovers fitted comfortably in the freezer. This morning, virtually all we had left to do was to wash up the breakfast dishes BY HAND(!), empty all the bins, remember to transfer the 2 kilo of cheese from the freezer to the suitcases (a mantra we had been chanting for over a day) and close all the doors.

Our taxi driver arrived five minutes early, as always, and, since he had allowed a generous amount of time to get to the airport, and we had allowed our usual ludicrous amount of time at the airport before boarding, Bernice remained perfectly calm throughout the drive, which was through fairly heavy traffic. This trip, for the first time, we decided to take a taxi from home to the airport, rather than to Jerusalem train station. We have eventually accepted the fact that struggling to lift two cases, two carry-ons and two backpacks onto the security scanner at the railway station and then down an escalator and a lift to the platform is not a dignified way for people our age to behave.

The airport was uncannily quiet when we arrived at 10AM. (For those of you who don’t know, Ben Gurion is usually a buzzing hive of activity at almost any time of day or night.) Our driver dropped us off at 9:57, and we were through security, baggage drop off, hand luggage check and passport control by 10:27. The longest queue was, unsurprisingly, at duty free, where we picked up our usual four bottles of wine, one for each of the next four Shabbatot. Fortunately, the usual 1+1 offer meant that we paid no more than we would have done in our local supermarket or vintner’s.)

Finally, time for a confession. I led you to believe that I was writing this post on the plane. This was because I fully expected to be writing the bulk of it there. However, as mentioned above, we were through all of the various stages of reaching the departure lounge unusually quickly, only to discover that the café Aroma has indeed closed at the airport. This left me with enough time to write this entire post before our flight is even called. In fact, it has just been called now, so….see you in Penamacor.

Hello from Penamacor. It’s now 10:45 on Monday evening (or 12:45 in real money), and we arrived at the house half an hour ago after a very easy and smooth passage through the airport at Lisbon, a very swift car pick-up, and an easy drive through a clear and dry evening. As always, the last 35 kilometres, on winding back-roads, was tiring, but we arrived in good shape and better spirits to a warm welcome from Tslil, Micha’el and Lua. Now it’s straight to bed, ready to face the onslaught from the boys at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning. Can’t wait!!