Haifa-Megiddo-Nazareth-MedSea

Today was a nice slow start… we left the apartment around 10AM and went for a swim at the beach.

The water was AMAZING – lots of fish to see – we swam out past the masses of people and had a really nice time.  The water in the Mediterranean is saltier than the Atlantic & we effortlessly floated around, looking down at what there was to see below.  Going under to get a better view of the fish was a challenge – but fun.

We worked our way slowly in to shore over a very rocky bottom & found several really beautiful unoccupied shells.

After a quick shower-up we drove to Nazareth only to find out the next tour in English was 2.5 hours away, so we drove to Megiddo and walked around there.  Super cool history dating back thousands of years BC.

Megiddo was built & destroyed 25 times & has 25 different layers of building/excavation. (everything above the wood in the picture below is renovation, but everything below it was original.)

what’s left of the silo

 

The top layer is from the time of King Solomon – what you see at the top of the picture below was the city gate during his time…what’s at the bottom of the picture is 150 years before.

part of the stables & Solomon’s chariot housing still remains.  All you horse lovers, they were well cared for in private stables with their own mangers (feeding troughs)…

yee-haw, y’all…

The coolest part (literally) for us was the steps & tunnel leading to their water source that lay outside the city walls.

186 steps down…

in a narrow shaft and then a tunnel to the spring.  (Sue, you’d have stayed at the top for this one)

and then 80-some-odd steps out…

Megiddo is noted in the Bible as the location of the Last Battle … you may know it as Armageddon.  here’s a shot of the valley:

Nazareth Village was very informative & fun.  They had people dressed in “time period” clothing and performing tasks that would have happened in Nazareth in Jesus’ day.

Emma got to play the farmer, we met the ‘shepherd’ and his sheep and saw carpentry, a kitchen & the weaver.

 

 

here’s an olive tree ‘doing it’s thing…putting out shoots…the root word in Hebrew had ‘Naz’ in it relating both to Nazarath & Jesse’s (father of King David) father…wish i could remember all the details he told us about…truly amazed at how God sets things up.

I think the winepress & olive press were my favorite, as our guide explained how each was used & we even had a human ‘mule’ work the olive press.  (while the guide hee-hawed for him… awesome)

Wine press (done with feet…)

 

Olive press… 4 part process.

 

We did see donkeys there, but they were the lazy, hang-out-under-the-olive-trees kind.   They did oblige & pose for pictures too.

There was a tomb, which was authentic, but not the one Jesus was in (of course…this is Nazareth)

and a synagogue, which was really cool.  In there, our guide picked up a Torah scroll & recalled the time Jesus read in the Synagogue from Isaiah.

 

We then all got a gift of an oil lamp…so our ‘light may so shine before men.’😉

we learned that the paved roads in nazerath were forged by the treds of mules over the many, many years..and as they ‘zig-zag’ uphill to make it possible to ascend with a load, the streets are CRAZY steep & curvy… San Francisco’s got nothing on Nazarath!  (these pictures really don’t do it justice)

We then took a drive north up the coast, did a ‘quick’ grocery stop and found a picnic place to watch the sunset.  WOW.  I don’t think there is a better word for it than PERFECT.

Our picnic…

Back to Haifa, the girls played on the playground right across the street from the apartment, met 2 local boys who spoke broken English, then went and got gelato…

The boys chased us down to get our Skype number.  Emma makes friends everywhere!

And the finishing touch… we found a hedgehog just hanging out in the courtyard of our apartment building (along with the cats…)

Shalom.