"We did not originally think we were gap year in Israel people. I need to start there, because this is a story about Israel, and not Bermuda or France. My son wanted to become fluent in French, and gain some life experience before college. We wanted him to have a job. One thing led to another and now he was in Tel Aviv, building a farming robot at an Israeli tech firm and learning Hebrew."

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"My sister-in-law comes up victorious, and books a 3 A.M. flight out of Ben Gurion Airport to Luton Airport, in London."

"My husband hits purchase on the ticket to Barcelona, and the site promptly crashes. When we come back online, the ticket is gone. No one is going to Barcelona.A friend who used to work at the State Department send me a press release: The federal government will be evacuating all U.S. citizens. I put my sons name on the evacuation list, picturing him hanging onto a helicopter door like hes being airlifted out of Saigon in 1975.My husband and I enlist my sister-in-law to help find a ticket any ticket out of Israel. The three of us message each other as all flights on American carriers vanish, leaving only the budget carriers willing to risk taking off during a war, flights that require a change in an Arab country, and the Israeli carrier EL AL. I figure that of all the airlines, the one with experience taking off in an active war zone is EL AL. We begin working to grab an EL AL flight to anywhere.For a brief moment weve found a flight to Paris. I have family in Paris Hungarian survivors from a different side of my family. They were nice to me when, as a teenager in the late 1980s, my family lived briefly in Paris."