First Book Club

The first meeting of the Alpine Cove/Box Elder Book club was intimate yesterday, with just Gaye Lynn, Debbie and myself! We discussed The Indifferent Stars Above by James Brown. It is about the ill-fated Donner Party. We wondered what causes some people to resort to cannibalism, and others just accept their fate and die. Even the fact that the Donner Party was not a cohesive group of immigrants probably did not bode well for the outcome of their trip.

Join us next month on April 25th, at 1 p.m. at Gaye Lynn's house. We'll be discussing the Orphan Keeper by Camron Wright. Hopefully, it will have a better ending! As a special bonus, Gaye Lynn will give you a tour of her house, which she is putting on the market! She's hoping you have a friend that would like to buy it! Here is a link if you'd like to check it out! https://www.utahrealestate.com/1513859

Home Again!

We're back! Half the fun of travelling is coming home! Coda was happy to see us. She is so nervous about us leaving her again, that when we go out and give her a peanut butter bone, she runs into the garage with us and drops the bone! She loves us more than peanut butter!

We hope spring comes soon to Alpine. This dusting of snow was an unwelcome surprise! We also hope we can get our sleeping clocks back in order! We're awake all night and sleepy all day!

We went to visit Kent and Annette in the hospital yesterday. Kent has had a bout of pneumonia, and has worried us significantly! We were happy that he was on the upswing and feeling good enough to eat a bowl of fruit! He was hiking Arches last week, and this came on suddenly. Hopefully, he'll be well enough for their big European adventure in three weeks!

Way of the Sea

Today we started at Haifa and drove down the coast to Jaffa, enjoying beautiful sea views all the way. The Roman Aqueduct outside Caesarea was one of my favorite spots!

Before we got to the sea we passed through Nazareth and talked about the fact that Joseph and Mary were part of a group of descendants of David that lived in the area. We would have expected them to live in Jerusalem.

Next we stopped at Haifa, where we enjoyed the beautiful view from a little area above the B'Hai faith headquarters.

Does it get any better than Roman aqueducts and blue ocean? I think not!

And to make it even better, Crystal and I got to dip our toes into the Mediterranean Sea!

In addition to the aqueduct, we stopped at the ruins of Caesaria, not far away.

It was fun to imagine what these ruins looked like in their heyday!

The amphitheater has been fixed up so they can use it for performances today. In ancient times it was twice as big! We wished Amanda had been with us to test the acoustics with an aria!

Our last stop was Jaffa. Who knew that it was the same Joppa talked about in the Bible. Jonah sailed from Joppa and ended up in the belly of a whale!

They have a very pretty church of St. Peters there in honor of the church changing its direction to start branching out to the gentiles as well as the Jews.

Do these look like weary travelers who are excited to go home tomorrow and sleep in our own beds? Yes! It has been a great trip, but 16 days is a LONG time to be gone!

On a sad note, Israel changes to daylight savings time tomorrow at 2 a.m. That means our 4 a.m. transfer to the airport will feel like 3 a.m.!

We said goodbye to our fellow travelers, singing Shalom Chaverim with them on the bus. We had a family join us a few days ago that is living in Kazakhstan. The mother's name was Mabel! It made us think of how much fun it will be to see our grandchildren when we get home. Too bad they will be in Colorado!

Flowers of the Holy Land

Yesterday I bought a great card game with pretty pictures of flowers from the Holy Land. The amazing thing was that we actually had enough energy after dinner to play one game!

It was like go fish, with different flower families. The only difference was that you had to ask for specific plants within the family. That made it more interesting,  because you could then guess what flower they had.

I think a few of the flowers in our deck were ones we had recognized from the trip. Here are the new flowers we saw today--they may have been cultivated rather than wild, but we enjoyed them just as much!

Capernaum, Galilee and Beatitudes

Our Kibbutz Hotel, Nof Ginosaur is located right on the Sea of Galilee. We took a little walk down to the dock after breakfast this morning!

Then we took a bus ride up to the headwaters of the River Jordan at a place called Tel Dan. It was a beautiful nature preserve, with lots of flowers and water. I wanted to stay all day!

We  found a fig tree with green figs on it. We learned it has two crops a year. The one in the spring is green, and the one in the fall is brown!

While I was taking a picture of the fig tree, the entire group of 28 people disappeared. I hurried to catch up with them, but unbeknownst to me, they had turned around and gone back to the parking lot! I sent an SOS to Crystal, who sent Ed on a rescue mission to find me. I got back just in time, but missed my potty break and had to hold it all morning! The text should say "fig" not "pig."

While I was wandering alone in the woods I saw some very pretty places the rest of the group missed out on!

From there we went to Capernaum, where Jesus spent the greater part of his ministry. 

There are remains of a very beautiful synagogue in Capernaum that date to later than Christ. But, there was also an earlier unexcavated synagogue in the same spot, where it is believed Christ had taught.

Ed helped Kathy get around with the wheel chair to help her get around faster, but there were still plenty of stairs and doors for her to navigate through.

We learned more about the miracles Christ performed there. Unfortunately, Christ got discouraged with the people in Capernaum, and actually cursed the city. The once thriving city of 10,000 almost completely disappeared a couple of centuries later.

We stopped for lunch at St. Pete's Restaurant, right on the sea of Galilee.

We enjoyed the fresh tilapia, right from the lake. One of the ladies found a shekel in the head of her fish. Her name is Mabel! Just like our granddaughter! Lucky Mabel!

We also had our first taste of fresh dates on the trip. They were so sweet we figured they must have been dipped in sugar first!

I've been taking lots of flower pictures, because I have gotten into the habit of it! But, I finally got some wildlife--a nice big lizard outside the restaurant!

Crystal also got a nice pastoral picture of some cows with a 'tel' in the background. That is a hill that has ruins in it, but it hasn't been explored yet.

Next we went for a boat ride on the sea of Galilee. It was very peaceful and serene.

Daniel talked about Christ's miracles on the sea. Nobody volunteered to try to walk on the water!

We enjoyed watching the seagulls and the other boats as we sat in the boat.

After the sea, we went to the site of the Sermon on the Mount. They have a beautiful church on the spot, that has equally impressive landscaping!

This is one of the many churches designed by Antonio Barluzzi, who became the "Architect of the Holy land," because he designed so many of the pilgrimage churches in Israel.

We sat under some trees facing the sea of Galilee and talked about the Sermon on the Mount.

Right next our hotel is a small museum that has the hull of a boat that was found in the Sea of Galilee. It was extricated and preserved. It is from the time of Christ, but was never really finished before it sank.

It felt so good to finish up by 5 today! Every other day we have finished up at 6:30 and have been exhausted by the time dinner was over. This is our original group of 9 (minus Laurie, who went home already). We only have one more day left on our tour, and this was the first time we really got to sit and visit!

Masada, Qumran and the Dead Sea

We had a hot day in Israel today! It must have been in the 90's--not really the perfect day to be at the top of the Masada! (But perhaps better than going in July!)

We had our last buffet breakfast at the Ramada in Jerusalem and packed up our bags for a circuitous route to Galilee.

First stop: the Masada, southeast of Jerusalem on the Dead Sea. There is a walking route up to the Masada, but it is 1800 feet in elevation change, and might be too much of a challenge for our group. We lost 11 people yesterday and added 18, so we're up to 28 people now.

Happily, our tour included a cable car ride to the top! I'll bet the Romans might have liked that when they were seiging the fortress!

The views from the top were incredible. Miles of hot, dry dirt! You can see the squares of dirt where the Romans made their encampment at the bottom of the hill.

Ed was Kathy's helper today. She had a couple in the group that went home yesterday that had helped her all over Jerusalem. She uses a walker to get around, and has to have someone help her up and down steps. There were a lot of steps at the Masada, and it was REALLY HOT, to boot!

Every chance we got we sat down in the shade to cool off!

Ken got to be Daniel's umbrella man while he read from the scriptures to us. He uses a cell phone, like we all do, but with the brightness of the sun, it is hard to read even in the shade. Ken was up to the task far more than Crystal several days ago.

There were  a few flowers left from their spring bloom a few weeks ago. But, they were hanging on for dear life! It is amazing anything can grow in that harsh climate!

A group of 960 Jewish zealots took their own lives here rather than surrender to the Romans. But, they had been well provisioned, even having some ritual bath tubs. I thought that tub would have made life very bearable here!

Their system of cisterns helped them conserve water. We were happy they also had some fresh water at the top for us!

We bought some crunch ice cream bars for the bus. They were even better than the ones in the states. I'm glad we didn't know about these earlier! We would have been buying them at every rest stop!

Our next stop was Qumran, the Essene site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Behind Crystal is a cave similar to the ones where the scrolls were discovered in 1947.

They had a copy of the temple scroll on display, but we had already seen the real one in the Israeli Museum last week!

I took a selfie, then proceeded to take another 8-10 selfies, thinking I had switched the camera direction. It was too bright to see the screen, so I didn't notice! I deleted all of the squinty-eyed accidental selfies I took, but Crystal thought I should have posted a few of them!

I did get this picture, so you can get the idea. Hot and dry, with cisterns and ritual baths!

We had a beautiful view of the Dead Sea from the bus all day. It looked a little like the Mediterranean!

We even got a chance to go swimming in the Dead Sea. It is 27 percent salt content. The ocean is only 3 percent salt!

The sand at Kalia Beach was muddy and black, and when you got salt on your lips you were stuck with it till you got out to wash up!

But, it was totally worth it. Floating was easy, and very comfortable! Daniel guaranteed us we couldn't get sunburned at 1400 feet below sea level! We'll see about that when we wake up tomorrow! But even if we didn't get sunburned, we did get hot and tired, and did a little snoozing on our way up to Galilee. Hopefully, that will be a good start toward our early morning wake up call tomorrow!