Leaving Tel Aviv

It's been a long day. It's late and we have an early morning tomorrow, so I won't be too detailed here I'm afraid.

Breakfast buffet again around 7am, bags out before leaving the room, downstairs to leave at 8:20am. Bus departed at 8:30am. We checked out and ID'd our bags to load the bus in there too. We drove North along the coast road. We visited Caesarea from about 10am to noon. It was the ruins of a massive coastal city built in Roman style about 30 to 10 BC by King Herod. It was interesting. We ate lunch at a restaurant there. It was a variety of dishes served family style with water and coffee or tea. It was OK. We had an addition to today's itinerary with an afternoon stop in Haifa with a view over it and the natural harbor from high on Mt. Carmel atop the Bahá'í Gardens. That was interesting and although it was a clear, sunny day, it was too hazy for a really long view as on a clear day you can see into Lebanon, but not today. Our last visit of the afternoon was Akko or Acre. It was completely different. It was a Crusades-era fort built about 1099 and then buried under dirt and rubble by a conqueror and forgotten about with a prison built atop it. It was the site of one of only 2 of Napoleon's defeats. It was really fascinating. I don't think we'd ever seen anything quite like it or anything of that era in that good a condition of preservation. Neglect can be a great preserver sometimes. It is still a mostly Arab villlage above ground!

We left to head east away from the coast to the Sea of Galilee and Scots Hotel in Tiberias for the next 2 nights. The sun was setting in the west as we left. We immediately landed in the mother of all traffic jams at what appeared to be a poorly timed stop light where it took us an hour to go about 5 miles. We wound up delaying dinner by 15 minutes to 7:15pm and we mostly went straight there. It is too bad we arrived after dark as it looks interesting. It is a former Church of Scotland mission and hospital that is now a hotel still owned and operated by the Church of Scotland. They put our group in the modern building they built to make the property a hotel. They served Scotch as their welcome drink! Dinner was served buffet style and I believe that will be true for breakfast here as well. Getting ice here was not done with the ease of the Carlton in Tel Aviv.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner were included today.

More tomorrow.

Photos