Thanksgiving in Israel

Thanksgiving is a time for family and turkey. However, here in Israel both are hard to come by, so we gave into the second best use of a Thanksgiving... i.e., ROAD TRIP!!! Our trip consisted of visiting Ein Gedi and Masada (both on the west side of the Dead Sea). We enjoyed swimming in the Dead Sea and finished up with a scrumptious dinner at the Tel Aviv Shearaton, turkey and all.
We stayed the night at the Kibbutz Ein Gedi. Anabelle loved that she got to sleep in a "play crib". She was hezitant to sleep there since "only babies sleep in cribs"... so, yes, our parental manipulation skills kicked in and we told her it was a "play crib" and that it would be fun to sleep in the "play crib". She quickly fell for that.
The next day Anabelle woke us up at the crack of dawn (literally) and after exploring our hotel grounds and a great breakfast we were off to Ein Geidi National Park.
























Ein Gedi has two main trails-David and Arugot- each following a stream by the same name. David's trail is a lot shorter and since we only had one day to hit three different places we went with David's trail. This trail also has a series of caves that you can see up on the mountain face. It is believed that this is where David hid from Saul (1 Samuel 24:1). The terrain is very arid and it reminded me a lot of Utah. Along the trail there were several waterfalls and Anabelle and Maria enjoyed jumping in to a couple of the pools to cool off.





You can see one of the caves right next to the main waterfall at the top of the trail




Once we were at the top of the trail Anabelle thought it would be fun to go fishing


After hiking for a couple of hours we headed a bit more south along the Dead Sea and visitedMasada National Park.
This is a picture (not ours) of what the whole fortress looks like from up high, looking at it from the North side. The East side of the bluff measures about 1,300 feet in height. On the West side you can see the Roman ramp.

It takes about an hour to two to hike up, but we took the cable car instead since we did not have the time to hike it. You can see some of the hikers going up on the right, they looked like ants.























This is what the fortress originally looked like. Nate is pointing at our location at the time we took the picture.

Masada is well known for being the last place of refuge for a group of about 930 Jews during the Great Jewish Revolt, after the First Jewish-Roman war. The Romans laid siege to the fortress for three months and finally built a ramp about 30 feet high on the West side of the cliff, but when they finally entered Masada they only found death and destruction. The people had set ablaze their precious fortress before committing mass suicide rather than being taken as slaves or worse. It is believed that the actual killing was done by ten chosen men, who then picked one last man from the ten to kill the nine left, so that only one man actually committed true suicide (as suicide was not acceptable in Jewish beliefs). The picture below shows nine stones found upon the ruins with what is believed to be the names of the ten men.

Ruins on the South and central side of the fortress.




There are at least 100 pics, but I can't post them all, so here are a few that I thought were interesting.
Here's one of Nate looking down on a huge cistern. There were several of these throughout the fortress, which is how they managed to stay barricaded for many months without needing to go out for provisions.

Byzantine Chapel (about 5th or 6th Century).

One of two Mikvahs found still pretty much intact.

Original flooring of the bath house.

Going down to the second level of the North side













Original pillars still standing on the first level on the North side

Well, there's lots more pics, but I'll spare you the scrolling. After spending almost three hours in Masada we finished our day (after having a very late lunch) relaxing and playing in the Dead Sea. Nate and Anabelle did the playing,

Maria did the pampering and relaxing at the Bein Gedi Spa for a couple of hours,
(these are pics from the Spa's website, since Nate took the camera and Maria couldn't take any pics of herself covered in mud and soaking in the Dead Sea hot springs. How convenient, no?)




and then we headed back to Tel Aviv to have a late Thanksgiving Dinner, courtesy of teh Fulbright Fellowship Israel Offices. It was the perfect ending to the perfect vacation. Anabelle ate a lot of food and ended up wearing a lot of her food too.