The Eastern Gate from the Mount of Olives.
I've been good during the day...but about 8:30 at night, boom, I hit a wall and can do nothing but crawl into bed, where I dream I'm still in Israel and wake up disoriented.
I assume this will go away soon and I'll be back to normal; likely wondering if it really happened, lol.
We had an amazing trip. Several folks have asked me what my favorite site was; I really can't answer that, although I can say that I learned the most at Masada. (I looked it up on Wikipedia; the details there don't *quite* match up to what our very learned guide told us.) I only had a vague notion of a battle there, and I thought it had to do with the Maccabees, so I was in the wrong historical period all together.
I had a lot of incorrect assumptions about many things; seeing how it really is was...amazing. The Sea of Galilee is much, much smaller than I had expected; the Dead Sea is much bigger, for all that is is evaporating at a rate of about 3 feet per year (plans are being made to bring in water from the Red Sea to stabilize the water levels). The desert is rocky...and looks almost Martian. Jerusalem's hills are very steep and the valleys are narrow.
I've been posting pictures in batches to my Facebook feed; putting notes on them as I go. But I can only do short batches in the evening before the jet lag hits and I lose my ability to spell at all, along with my ability to compose a coherent sentence with all the words in it.
The travel itself...the flights in and out of New York, and the 11+ hour flights between New York and Tel Aviv...was a test of endurance. I had long layovers in New York both coming and going, and the last one was especially rough because every time I sat down, I started to nod off to sleep. I was afraid I'd fall sound asleep and miss my boarding call for the flight back to Nashville, so I spent a lot of time just walking around the terminal and telling myself I could sleep on the plane once we boarded. But, once I finally got on board that last plane, I got afflicted with what my grandma called 'the heebie-jeebies' in my legs...the muscles were twitching and spasming in a very itchy and irritating way. I had a window seat, which would have been good had I been able to lean against the cabin wall and snooze, but with my restless legs I was bordering on claustrophobia. It was an exercise in self talk "It's only 2 hours... it's only an hour and 45 minutes....it's only 90 minutes...' etc.
I was really glad to stand up when we got to Nashville. I told My Sweet Baboo that if I go again with him...we are going to upgrade the seats!
I have to admit, I am a terrible skeptic. I know that there were unscrupulous folks in the middle ages who took advantage of folks on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, selling them bogus relics. I wondered if those same shysters had created semblances of holy sites, insisting that, for instance, that particular slope was where Jesus taught the Beatitudes. But there's no doubt that Jesus taught on the southern steps of the Temple, which have been excavated. And the Garden of Gethsemane is still there, with its 2,000 year-old olive trees that could tell us of Jesus's prayers, if they could talk. Capernaum is excavated...and maybe the house identified as belonging to Peter didn't really belong to Peter, but it was there at the right time; someone lived in it who would have been known to Jesus.
And the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found are there to be seen, having sheltered the incredible texts that prove that the Old Testament scripture we have today is fundamentally unchanged from the texts of Jesus' day.
I have a lot of personal processing to do still; I came home Saturday night, pretty well zonked, and have just managed to do what I need to do in the daylight before getting zonked again, so the only processing I've done so far is to write the little blurbs for the Facebook posts.
It was an amazing trip and I'm ever so glad I went.
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