Month: June 2022

After the River Jordan stop, we drove the surprisingly short distance to the oldest city in the world, Jericho. Here we saw a few little things while driving around, and stopped for lunch near the ancient tel. We were exhausted, but our taxi drivers sort of held us hostage–they absolutely insisted that we visit their…

I really should have titled this post “The Original River Jordan”, since it is indubitably the first. But I live so close to the one in Utah… Our van taxi got to the site first—moving through the demilitarized zone. Of course, throughout most of Israel’s history it has been at war with Jordan, and the…

Bright and early Monday morning, we met our two taxi drivers to venture into the West Bank. Before we decided to do this, we chatted with various people to gauge the safety of such an excursion—the State Department recommends that Americans do NOT travel into the Palestinian territories, and of course our rental doesn’t allow…

It always feels vaguely unjust to get sick on a vacation, doesn’t it? I spent Sunday quite miserable with a stomach bug (sadly, it seems Em’s illness was NOT food poisoning). LaDonna was queasy as well, and Eva had a headache. So Sunday was a missed day, with most of us staying home and trying…

Tomorrow we are going to be daring–we’re going into the West Bank, taking a bus to Qumran National Park. (We aren’t allowed to take our car into the occupied territories.) It’s going to be interesting!

The promised resolution and happy ending: No, we didn’t end up finding my glasses. They are either a) destined for some very near-sighted Egyptian child (given the direction of the longshore drift) or b) going to be found embedded in shelly sandstone by some future archeologist who will use them to date the era in…

Wednesday we chose to relax and not try to do anything. It was greatly needed and appreciated. Early that morning I took my breakfast down to the beach and walked about 2 km along the shoreline, thinking about some church-calling related things that will have to be done when we get home. It was very…

We generally plan out our days with too much stuff, and then cut down as needed. On Tuesday, we decided to drive out to Nazareth (not quite 90 minutes away, but with traffic, a bit longer), and then go to Akko on the way back. Nazareth wore most of us out, and tempers were a…

While we stopped at Caesarea Maritima on the way to our new lodgings on Sunday, that was really just a stop to kill time until we were allowed to check in. So we just wandered and didn’t stress too much. But we definitely didn’t see everything we wanted to, so on Monday we went back….

Sunday was moving day again. We left our beautiful apartments on the Sea of Galilee, and moved to a gorgeous house, big enough for all of us, on the Mediterranean coast in a town called Netanya.