We woke up to gorgeous weather and a big hiking agenda. If Palestine doesn’t want us at the main religious sights we will happily take the path less traveled! We also woke up to an email from Expedia saying we needed to call and change our flights asap. We worked on that intermittently but haven’t gotten anywhere. We still have 6 days to find a way out of here.
We left the apartment shortly before 8am and headed for our favorite/worst Rami Levy grocery store. It has good prices but droves of shoppers. We finally figured out that you have to send a person with a almost empty cart to stand in line and then you send “satellites” out to get the groceries. Everyone does that. And we’re not talking just a few groceries! We are talking enormous carts heaped to the max! I thought I knew how to heap a cart but I actually don’t, although I am taking lessons. Luckily that early we managed to grab a picnic lunch in a few minutes and off we headed for Wadi Qelt.
I wish I knew how to write about the hikes we take. They are all incredibly different, but when you go to write about it it suddenly seems like a lot of vain repetition.
☑️ Desert
☑️ Sand
☑️ Stream
☑️ Wildflowers
☑️ Rock hopping across stream
☑️ Climbing ladders
☑️ Sunshine
☑️ Narrow Canyon
And yet, they are all unique. This one was about 9km long and had more water, more flowers and more rock scrambling then the rest. Its right along the old road from Jerusalem to Jericho and was the setting for the Good Samaritan Parable. There were lots of caves and even sheep and goats with their Herders on donkeys. It was truly natural Israel!
We did forget to bring along what was apparently the most important hiking gear according to those around us… our Uzi’s! I don’t think I would be exaggerating if I said we saw at least 50 of them on other hikers. And probably only 70 other hikers in total, so definitely something that seemed necessary. Maybe next time.
We found a shady place to take a break and had church by reading the Good Samaritan story.
From there we made a quick stop at the muddy Jordan River to see where John the Baptist probably spent his time. It was near a military base and on either side of the road there were signs warning of land mines. They were working around them with huge armored pay loaders so that was a new sight.
After a quick stop at Qumran (think Dead Sea Scrolls) we headed for our last hike,Nahal Og. It’s another place that the average tourist never sees. The article below has a pretty good description if you’re interested.
And thus another day is over…
It’s a Small World 
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