Buckle up! We're hitting the road!

 First day with our guide, Matthew, who was born and raised in Ohio, moved to Israel 20 years ago and made his Aliyah (ascended into - immigrated- to Israel ten years ago).  Great guide!  We are getting a full running stream of information in our ears full time.  Like drinking from a fire hose!  

We left Tel Aviv today and headed out to Caesara - A town that was built by King Herod as a promise to Rome to keep him in power.  Herod build himself a nice little resort complete with a homemade bay, port, castle, a freshwater swimming pool, an ampitheater for plays and shows, a hippodrome for chariot races, a colliseum for blood sport - men fighting each other to the death or being fed to lions for example - complete with underground jail cells.  It was in one of these cells that Jesus's disciple Paul was held for committing the crime of spreading the gospel.  They actually charged him with something else, to get him off the streets.  He died a martyr.  The site was a beautiful National Park on the Mediteranean Sea.


We left there and visited amazing ancient water ducts built to supply fresh water to the town.  We were able to walk down the beach, sand as soft as Wildwood's, and collect some shells and put our feet in the water.



Our next stop was a Unesco World Heritage Site - Tel Meggido.  A Tel is a hill or mound made up of many different historical eras piled on top of each other, like a layer cake with each layer representing centuries of civilizations rising and falling, and more being built on top.  This site was valued as a prime location strategically, politically, historically, etc.  It overlooks a large area of fields - those fields were imagined to be the place where Armageddan would occur and the world would come to an end.  It is an archeologists' dream - and also nightmare - because to get to each layer, you essentially destroy the ones before it.


We then continued northward along the coast fo Mt. Carmel - an amazingly beautiful panoramic view of the entire surrounding area...from there we could see Jesus's home town of Nazareth.  Nazarath was a very small town in Jesus's time - thought of as sort of a backwoods town - only about 200 people in it - all related to each other.  Now, it is a very crowded, but not so bustling town, sort of dingy and dirty.  We visited the Church of the Annunciation - essentially where Mary was told the Holy Spirit would come over her and she would have a baby that would be the Son of God.  Some believe it was in her house. So, this church is a church built in the 60's over a church build in the Crusades, built over a house that could have been Mary's.  There is a lot of that one thing on top of another here in Israel.

Somewhere along the way, we passed three tombs that they found when they excavated to try to widen the road.  The tomb had a roll away stone just like the one that Jesus had in front of his tomb so they date it to be in the first century.



We took the road from Nazareth - essentially following Jesus's footsteps as he would have visited all of the towns in the area.  We actually went through Cana, which is where Jesus performed his first miracle of turning water into wine.

We are spending the next three days in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.  

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