Moving on out …

Our Pre-camp has ended and it’s time to move from Kfar Maccabiah to Netanya as the next chapter in this journey begins. It’s a pretty big ordeal trying to move more than 1,000 people in and out of one hotel. For what it’s worth, things did move pretty smoothly today, even as our luggage was loaded onto a different bus than we were riding on. (Big thanks to the Field Hockey Team, who were patient as we checked and rechecked to make sure all our luggage make it to Netanya, only to find out that some stuff actually got moved onto their bus and wasn’t underneath.)

Our hotel in Netanya, the Galil Hotel is … well … adequate. That’s the word we’ve chosen to describe this place. I wholeheartedly miss our lovely accommodations from four years ago at the Optima Hotel but this will do. I just keep reminding myself that this is much better than the Swan Lake Resort!

Tonight, the semi-finals of the Israeli National Bowling Championships were taking place at the bowling center in Netanya. It gave us a chance to see some of the Israeli Maccabi athletes, check out the competition and the shot, move our equipment to the bowl, and maybe get in some practice. The bowling center is above a Mega supermarket (yes, that really is the name). It’s a nice, modern AMF center.

The scores were pretty mixed in the Championships and some of the men were averaging well over 200. It was nice to connect with some of the people I met in Israel in 2005 and in Australia in 2006 and I’m looking forward to seeing them more over the next two weeks.

As for practice, well that almost didn’t happen. The going rate at the bowling center after 5 p.m. is 25 shekels (about $6.25) per game. Even by U.S. standards, that is pretty steep. We tried to negotiate on our own with the center and they wouldn’t budge. We had our Maccabiah Sport Coordinator try on our behalf and nothing changed. We even had an official from the IBF (Israeli Bowling Federation) and the ETBF (European Tenpin Bowling Federation) try to work their magic but they also came up empty-handed.

In the end, we paid the 25 shekels a game and each only bowled one game (which also came with 15 minutes of practice which was a nice addition), but it was the principle that burned us all. Here we are, athletes coming to Israel for the Maccabiah, and they can’t even give us some kind of break? Surely they would make it up in volume with all the athletes who will be practicing, on their own dime (or shekel in this case) over the next few days. To me, that’s just being pretty shortsighted, but if I ruled the world there would be plenty of things done differently … that’s a soapbox for another time.

Tomorrow our friends from Great Britain, Australia, and Canada are scheduled to arrive and we’ll be checking out the finals of the National Championships. It’s really starting to look like the Maccabiah! Laila tov.