The start off of this day must be stated with two words...FRENCH TOAST. Who could imagine that breakfast could get even better!! (Yup, it’s a running theme!)
We started our third day with Gershon ready to get wet. Our first stop: Banana Boating in the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). It was barely 9 in the morning and already the day was warm and the water was gorgeous. My mom and Gershon took Asher on the speed boat, and the rest of us climbed aboard a banana boat built for eight. We loop-d-looped and jumped the waves and thought this was the ultimate fun, but we were wrong. We headed back into the docks and switched onto a giant round raft with a back wall. We each took our position and grabbed onto the hand grips on the seat. Off we flew. Okay, my perspective was a little different then the rest of the family’s because I seemed to be incapable of maintaining my seat. I kept bouncing around and losing my hand grips and laughing so hard I thought I might gag. It was AWESOME!!!!
Still grinning, we got back into the van and headed back toward the Golan where Gershon had it planned that we would do one of the area’s most famous hikes, the Banyas. Certain young people saw the parking lot, saw the hot terrain and got kinda prickly. After the Nahal Yehudia yesterday, they were not interested in lots of stairs or exertion. Hahahah. So there were lots of stairs and it was a bit of work getting down, but wow. The Banayas is an incredible waterfall in a crevice between mountains. It’s a fast flowing stream with gorgeous foliage all around. To stop people from hiking through the stream, the Israeli government built a beautiful sidewalk platform. By the time we really got into it, the bad moods had evaporated. Oh, and the walk back to the car was much less then the walk down to the beginning had been.
We were, as usual, running a bit behind. It was already mid-afternoon, and David and I had really been looking forward to going to Tzefat (Safed), so we stopped on the way and grabbed pizza in the car for all (ok, falafel for Elisheva and myself).
Tzefat is an incredibly unique city. It is considered the city that represents the element of air. The city is in the low mountains above the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), right next to another famous place, Mount Meron, on which lies the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. To get to Tzefat, one must drive up a winding switchback and the roads are incredibly narrow but still hold two way traffic.
In the middle ages, Tzefat became the home to a number of important (Kabbalists) Jewish mystics, most notablely Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, the Arizal. The synagogues there are beautiful, but unfortunately we didn’t get to as many of the holy sites as we would have liked. The kids were a bit tired and walking through Tzefat requires going up and down a lot of hills and stairs and it's all cobblestone, which is a bit tiring on one’s feet.
 |
| Ok, we took this one specifically for all my friends who went to Livnot! |
The other significant fact of Tzefat is that in the modern era it has become the home of a huge Jewish artist colony. And David and I had arrived here with a mission. We wanted to buy a picture of Jerusalem to be the focal point of our dining room. We saw some beautiful paintings, but none of them were “just right.” However, a certain painting of Tzefat caught out attention and it turned out that the owner of the gallery was from Montreal and his niece is in Leah’s class.
When we finally got David through the artists colony (after the purchase of some beautiful challah covers), we had a brief tour of the city. We started (and probably spent too much time) at the Tzefat Candle Factory where they make beautiful candles and sell and incredibly wide range of braided havdallah candles. We began to make our way back through the colony to the car to figure out mincha (afternoon service) and dinner and getting Gershon to his bus. As we passed the first gallery we had entered, they called our attention. The gallery owners wife, his primary artist, had just brought over two pictures of the Western Wall that she had recently finished. Bingo! (So come visit to see.)
By the time the men finished the afternoon service it seemed silly to leave Tzefat without eating, We ended up having supper at a cute little restaurant called The Tree of Life, which was a healthy food restaurant. The kitchen was tiny and the staff consisted of the owner, who was cook and waitress, and her assistant. Tired but satisfied, we bid good bye to Gershon (who caught a bus back home, leaving us on our own until we would meet up with him again in Jerusalem on Sunday) and headed back to the Yavne’el Bed and Breakfast.
No comments:
Post a Comment