Last Full Day in Israel
OK, it’s been 12 days of travel, schlepping from place to place, jumping on and off buses and seeing some amazing sites. We end our tour tomorrow morning with a 7:40 AM flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul and then from Istanbul we have a straight shot to LAX. We started this morning in Eilat, which is the southern most point in Israel. We drove to the Egypt boarder yesterday on our drive to the snorkeling park. So, we have to drive from the southern most tip of Israel to Tel Aviv, which is about 250 miles north.
On the way, we drove mostly through the desert and saw lots of dirt and sand. We did make a stop at Ben Gurion’s burial tomb and the house he lived in later in life. It was on the top of a small mountain and the views were just beautiful. I was able to get some great pictures of the family before we got back on the bus for the final 3 hours of driving back to Tel Aviv. We will meet our cousin, Marsha Turken, for dinner tonight and then head back for an early morning wake up call. We will need to leave the hotel by 4:30 AM in order to safely get through the airport.
I must say that the trip was amazing, but different than I thought it would be. When the tour guide asked me what I expected from our trip to Israel before we arrived I told him “I didn’t have any expectations, but a friend of mine told me that his trip to Israel was “magical” and changed his life.” So, I was under the assumption that when I arrived in Israel that I would feel something magical, and I don’t believe I did. I thought that the country was spectacular and I’m so glad that we decided to hold Noah’s Bar Mitzvah where we did, but I didn’t feel anything magical other than watching our son complete his big day on the top of a mountain.
In addition, this trip gets me more excited about the upcoming trip where we will seeing so much more history of the world. The Roman ruins of Caesarea and Bet She’An were amazing, as was Masada and Petra. Visiting the Diaspra Museum, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, the Theodore Herzl Museum and the Israel Museum makes me believe that we will be visiting more museums on our travels. Seeing history up close was very cool and I look forward to more of that in Greece, Turkey and all through Europe.
I also look forward to documenting the journey in this blog and capturing our families journey in a new book that we will be writing together called The Connected Family. We will be posting chapters one at a time on a new website that is currently under construction at http://www.TheConnectedFamily.org.
Larry Kesslin 