Wednesday
We slept ok. We’ve forced ourselves to just adjust to local time. It’s a 7 hour difference so it’s definitely confusing for our bodies, but we try to trick it and it seems to work ok. The boys were out pretty quick, but we all seem to wake up quite a bit throughout the night. At 6:30a the phone obnoxiously rang... actually it was more of an awful beeping noise with our unexpected wake up call.
We drove back towards the airport and Tel Aviv to start our adventures today. Our first drive-by stop was at the Aqua duct at Cesaerea, right on the beach. I would have liked to have stopped here, but we didn’t. They built this wall all the way from the ocean to further inland to move water. Every mile the wall drops a yard. I can’t even imagine how long it would have taken to build this!
Caesarea
A center of the early Christians where an angel visited Cornelius, the first Gentile believer (Acts 10), and where Paul was imprisoned for two years before appealing to Caesar.
This was one of my favorite stops of the day and certainly Bryan’s favorite. We started at the Theater at Caesarea. On our way into the theater, we walked by several statues (or what’s left of them) outside the theater in a little nook. We snapped a quick pic with Ethan in front of a giant foot. But Ethan was most curious to why did they made models of naked people?! My response... “cause that’s what artists did back then.”
We went inside the amphitheater and Ethan just wanted to run up and down the stairs, but we moved at such a fast pace he only had time to make a quick run down to the bottom for a photo opp with Mark. Part of it was under construction so we couldn’t get the full effect, but it was a very cool amphitheater right on the Mediterranean Sea. The wind was easily 30-40 mph plus heavier gusts! We almost lost Ethan into the mud.
King Harrod had the vision to create the largest port on the Mediterranean. It came to be when he began building a VERY impressive port by sinking barges with volcanic ash to create the break water for the port. The volcanic ash turned to concrete to keep these structures in place. This port became the 3rd largest port in the world. In addition to the port, he built the theater and an arena for chariot races (and gladiators early on). The area became a thriving city.
Much of the city has sunk into the sea today. We can see very little of the port. We can only imagine how cool it would be to dive into the water and see this whole underwater city/port. Just to see so much of the arena and theater was very cool. To see these structures made out of sandstone is so cool! Each stone is SO big, it’s hard to imagine these people building these structures.
We watched a short video that gave us a brief history of the city and how it was destroyed and rebuilt over the years. We would have loved to explore this place at length, but back on the bus!
Tel Megiddo
Tel Megiddo (Armageddon) National Park was my other favorite stop of the day. We started with a quick “fast food” style lunch in the little restaurant at the park. Bry had a falafel sandwich and I had a schnitzel sandwich (in a pita pocket). There was a spread on the table to dress up our pockets... pickles, peppers, eggplant in a tomato sauce, and other goodies. And we got French fries!
At this point we are trying our best to dodge rain throughout our outings. Unfortunately, it had continued raining after lunch. We watched a short film and walked out into the park where we were surrounded in unique ruins of the old Israelite city of Megiddo. It was an administrative center for the Jezreel Valley. In this location we are in a main travel gateway... this HUGE valley is the main route for passing through this area because the other routes would have been through desert and other hard to travel areas.
Possibly during the reign of Solomon (10th century B.C.) they build a massive wall and a monumental city gate. The city gate was pretty incredible. They are always excavating more and more land, so it seems as if they are constantly revealing more history. And if things are well funded, they really try to preserve some things and rebuild parts of others. It’s pretty incredible and extremely fascinating!
Nazareth
The idea of being in Nazareth was very cool. The common thing to do with history here is to build churches over ruins to preserve and protect the ruins. Also, they build shrines of sorts, typically within the church. It’s all very interesting and hard to explain. The church was amazing and unique in Nazareth. In this particular church there was a shrine with the ruins of what they believed to be part of the home of Jesus’ mother Mary. Is this true? We don’t really know, but churches like this one build beautiful churches and they protect history. SO, although they’re a little odd, it IS very cool. And if that’s not where Mary lived, it’s still a real piece of history and SOMEBODY actually lived there a really long time ago. Ha!
Cana
We went to the Franciscan Wedding Chapel which is where Jesus performed his first miracle. We read the story of Jesus’ first miracle and sang together in a covered area outside of the church. Then, we went inside. It appears to be a pretty small, but grand church (compared to anything you’d see back home). As we went down the stairs, we basically walk into ruins. The floor is glass and you can see that we are directly over ruins that they have tried to preserve by building over top of it. It was another quick stop, but so interesting to take in all the sites.
The day overall... it’s so fascinating to see how much of Israel is being excavated to search for parts of the old cities. Sometimes it starts because a farmer runs into a giant rock or structure while farming and that begins a deeper investigation on what else might be hiding. So many structures are built on top of, and that structure gets built on top of, and so on over the years. Many churches are built over an old structure as a way to protect it and build these shrines of sorts to the old biblical stories.
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