I arrived into the ATL on Monday afternoon after a 12 hour flight from Istanbul. It was the inaugural flight from Istanbul to ATL! Lots of bands and free drinks. Amazing reception.

Rode on Marta to Chamblee Station. Jesse picked me up. He insisted on driving me home. Made sense since I’d only had about 3 hours of sleep in two days. Pretty much conked out as soon as I got home around 10pm.

Woke back at 5am. Couldn’t sleep. Started the mammoth job of archiving my trip on the blog. Normally a day’s blog will take ma about 15 minutes to do. I had 14 days worth of intense traveling to collate. Took me about 4 hours. It’s important to me that I archive my memories on line. Over 20% of my life is now online. I can go through pretty much every day and see what happened. It’s a discipline I take seriously.

Kathy says that I can remember stuff way better than most people. I think it’s because I take pictures and write down what happened, not only on my blog, but also a short note in my One Year Bibles. For instance, from now on, every May 12th I will celebrate the Independence day of Israel!

First job is to upload the pictures I took. As I mentioned yesterday, I took way more pictures than normal because not only did I shoot with my Canon Elph camera, I also shot with my iPhone to put my pilgrimage live on Facebook. I took 1,647 pictures with my camera and several hundred with my phone.

My trip to Israel was my last on this current passport.

I only have 6 months left on it. So one job was to order a replacement. I’ll get my picture for it this morning. Here are the places I’ve been.






Israel doesn’t stamp your passport. They give you little pages you have to carry around.

Cleaned and refilled my hummingbird feeders and bird seed feeders.

Rained a little over 1/2″.

Kathy and I went to Clarkston to meet up with Jesse and Ashley and Penelope for lunch at Kathmandu Grill. It was exceptionally good. Fantastic to see my family again!

After eating, I went through my stuff from Israel to share with the kids. My prize is a 2,000 year old oil lamp from Jerusalem from the time of Herod and Jesus.

Went back to Azalea with Jesse to pick up my car. Good to talk with the kids and families there! Ashley always does that little something extra to make me feel special. Best daughter EVER. Period.

Came home to rest and work on admin duties.

Up early to finish working on the blog. Time is really blurry from the last several days. Wednesday I went to eat breakfast with Kathy. I’d been up since around 6:30am. Got home around noon. Slept till 2:30pm. Worked on admin duties for about an hour. Took a “nap” from 4:30 to nearly 10pm! Got up to kiss Kathy good night and went back to sleep from 10:30pm to 4:30am Thursday morning.

I’ve been up since then. Gave myself a haircut. Cleaning the house. Caught up my One Year Bible with the things I’d done since I left for the Israel Pilgrimage. I don’t carry my Bible with me on trips any more. Instead, I take a picture with my iPhone of every day and read from that. Saves about three pounds on weight.

Catching up on the blog from the last few days. Again, it all blurs together. Night and day. I look at the clock, it says 2:00. I have no idea if that’s 2am or 2pm. That’s messed up.

I have a gig later today at FBC Jonesboro. Hopefully, I’ll be able to stay up and sleep through the night.

I had the same problem when I was in Israel. First three days, I was lucky to get asleep by 5am. So I was running on just a few hours of sleep every night. After that, my body seemed to get the rhythm of the days/night.

Jerusalem is 7 hours ahead of ATL time. So right now it’s 7:09am. It feels like it should be in the afternoon. Bizarre. It’ll get better. Just takes time. Can’t be too worried about it.

I’ll finish my admin duties then go to do the shopping at Walmart and hopefully get my passport picture taken and the forms in the mail. When I ordered this passport, they ask if you want the 52 page “el grande” edition of the passport, rather than the standard 21 page. I opted for the big one. I think that shows my optimism that I’ll be traveling that much by the time I turn 68!