Every year for spring break everyone always has big and crazy plans. Normally I don’t do anything for these big breaks, I just stay home and watch movies with the family. This past year was a little different. A friend of mine called me up and asked if I’d be interested in going down to Eilat for a few days. Since I didn’t have other plans it sounded like a good idea. We bought our bus tickets and were very excited to be going.
The bus ride from Tel-Aviv to Eilat is about six or so hours. What you do is buy the tickets before boarding the bus and when the bus stops to make a rest stop everyone can get off and then you have to get your ticket checked again to get back on. At the rest stop there was a McDonalds. My friend and I were starved so we went in to order food. Thankfully it was a short line because we were worried about our bus leaving without us. We figured that we had a bit of extra time, and would be able to see everyone loading the bus again through the windows so we sat down to have lunch. The burgers were a little bit more messy than they are normally and my friend accidentally dropped some very saucy lettuce on her lap. I said, “no worries we can just go to the bathroom and clean it up!”
To the bathroom we went. While we were in there I realized that I really had to use the bathroom so while she was washing her pants I went to use the bathroom. When I got out she was drying her pants under the air hand drier. By this point there had been so much excitement going on that we had forgotten all about the bus. It wasn’t until we walked out of the bathroom and saw a big green bus pulling away. You know that feeling when time just seems to stop. This was one of those moments. It took about 5 seconds for both of us to realize that our bus had just left without us. We ran out of the McDonalds in a crazy attempt to chase down the bus, but it was too far gone.
We ended up staying at the McDonalds until the next bus down came by. We explained to the driver what had happened and showed him our tickets. He allowed us on but there were no more seats available so we had to sit on the stairs for the remainder of the ride. When we finally made it to Eilat we had to track down the bus that our bags were on, thankfully the driver noticed that the bags were not claimed so he had given them to the office at the central bus station in Eilat. Once we were reunited with our bags we were finally able to start our spring break.