After a stressful week of rocket attacks and Ed being gone to Chicago, we headed up to the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee (now called Kinneret) on Wednesday morning to join the students for a long weekend (coinciding with Thanksgiving). On the way up we stopped at Beit She'an, a well-preserved city from the Roman period, contemporary with Christ, and at a Crusader castle named Belvoir. The kids thought that both were cool, but mostly they just collected rocks.
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| Here's Joe climbing under a wire fence to get at the gravel. |
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| A very sunny Beit She'an (pronounced bait shawn) |
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| What better time and place for a Greek lesson? |
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| We were at a real Crusader castle, with a moat and a drawbridge and a keep and towers and everything, and this cardboard knight was their favorite part. Why do Ed and I even bother? |
The first day at Ein Gev Holiday Resort was sunny and warm, and luckily we got there early enough in the afternoon that the kids could play a couple hours in the water before the lifeguard left and the sun went down. The rest of the weekend was dominated by rain--sprinkling or driving--but the kids still spent hours each day on the beach building dikes and dams and rivers and castles. We stayed in a TINY little cottage that left Ed and I out on the patio every evening (because there was no place to sit inside once the kids went to bed), but it was the closest to the beach so I could nap Joe and still keep an eye on the kids.
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| One of the times Joe and Abby escaped to the beach. |
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| Every night was a beautiful sunset. |
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| All the kids, trying to sink Isaac's ship (which he made at the toy shop I'll tell you about further down). |
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| We took our beach towels to the playground to wipe the rain off the playscape. Then Abby stretched out the towel and pretending she was down on the beach. |
The BYU students have, as usual, been wonderful and joined the kids in building and playing--Saturday before church two students played hide and seek with Linda and Abby for an hour, and another student spent a half hour teaching Mary and Isaac to skip rocks.
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| Hide and seek with Kayla, who hid right behind Abby and scared the giggles out of her. |
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| And here's Brandon hiding behind beach chairs. |
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| At various times, all the kids managed to convince someone to loan them their iPad to play games. |
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| What's vacation without TV? |
On our last afternoon, Isaac started his very own Stratford Spa, where he gave the students mud foot massages. Those sweet students were lined up to have a turn.
It's very quiet and calm here, with very little to do when it rains. But we were treated to some spectacular thunderstorms, and the rain forced us to explore the kibbutzim nearby, resulting in a couple good finds like the chocolate factory, the kiddie train, and the one we spent two hours at one morning: the Woodshop. Full of wooden toys and an indoor playground, it also had an attached children's woodshop where the kids could buy kits and be assisted in painting and assembling their own toys. All the kids had a fantastic time, and it turned what I thought would be an boring, cranky, rainy day into a wonderful memory.
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| The pirate slide |
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| Joe was happy for nearly three hours and screamed when it was time to leave. |
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| Abby, the Pirate Princess |
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| Isaac made a boat, and Mary made a pull-toy for Joe for Christmas. |
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| The kids got to do all the steps: drilling, sanding, hammering, painting, gluing. |
This trip has brought back so many good memories of our family trips to Long Beach when I was a kid--watching a lot of TV, playing on a cold, rainy beach, the smell of wet laundry permeating the house, putting on that wet laundry to go back down to the beach (because nothing ever really gets dry...)
We managed to go sight-seeing just one morning. We hit the Mount of Beatitutudes. . .
. . . and Capernaum, home of Peter the apostle. The entire town has been excavated, including a synagogue rebuilt in the Byzantine era, regular city streets, and even a home they think actually belonged to Peter. One group of believers is so convinced this site is actually Peter's house they have built a floating church over the top of it with a plexiglass floor you can look down through.
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| The synagogue. Nice gut, Ed--can you try harder? |
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| The floating church. |
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| The coastline comes right up to the edge of the excavated city. Perhaps this is where Peter cast in his nets. |
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| We miss you, Uncle Pete! |
