The Trip Home (posted two days after writing it)
It started with a 4 AM wakeup call. One of the interesting opportunities of international travel is to try to change your sleep patterns so you can avoid jetlag. We are 10 hours ahead of CA so I told the kids to stay up as late as possible in Tel Aviv and get a few hours of sleep. So, we all stayed up until about midnight, which gave us 4 hours of sleep. We are flying from Tel Aviv to Istanbul and will arrive in Istanbul at about 10 AM, which will be midnight in San Diego. We will head to an airport lounge and try to get some sleep until our next flight. The next flight from Istanbul to LAX will have us arriving around 4 PM and hopefully we will have slept a total of 8-9 hours between last night and the flights home. If we do that and then go to sleep between 9 – 11 PM in San Diego then we will hopefully reduce the amount of jetlag we have.
Having traveled a bit, it seems to be much easier to travel west and adjust to time zones than it is to travel east. The kids have school on Monday so they will only have 1.5 days to get back onto PST. We will see how they do. Ilise gets back on Sunday morning after stopping in NYC as she traveled with her mom for this trip. We have a layover in Istanbul and will spend most of the time in the Priority Pass lounge with the family. We all had 3 plus hour layovers as Ilise and her mom left just after 1 PM and I had a flight with the kids around 12:30 PM.
We arrived in Istanbul right on time around 9:30 AM and we all headed to the airport lounge to get some breakfast and relax before our 14 hour flight home. Ouch! In the lounge everyone was on the laptops or smartphones and then a young man sat down next to me. We started talking and it turns out that he is a 30 year old MBA student at Stanford with a deep background in social impact investing. Where else on earth does this happen?
His name is Ophir Samson and he is a PhD and one of the founding members of Groupon. He is a British Israeli and we had an amazing conversation about the future of impact investing and the whole purpose movement in general. I really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to staying connected with Ophir moving forward.
The last flight home was long and I was able to get some sleep and watch about 6 or 7 movies. You lose count after a while, but the flight was just fine. When we landed at LAX the kids were great. We got through customs, picked up the car and were home by 8:45 PM, just like we had planned. Both kids went straight to bed and all is well in the Kesslin family. Ilise comes home tomorrow and then the house will be back to normal.
Looking forward to being back at home and preparing for our big trip.
‘Til next time ……
Larry Kesslin 