The Last Day in Israel (This Time)

Sunday, July 9th was our final day in Israel. Our flight home would leave early the next day, and we were anxious to make the most of it. The family voted to return to Ayin Mevoah, the desert spring we had been to the previous week. This time my mother trekked down with us. We all had a lot of fun. The kids wanted to take a series of pictures that would make it look like they were throwing the water up into the swimming area. (The photos weren’t so convincing, lol.)

Refreshed as the day began, we headed back into Jerusalem detouring, to the (ahem) “delight” of our children, to the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, where we had both been students (at different times). If we had had more time, perhaps we would have gone into the campus. David had a particular desire to get in to the campus synagogue, which has an amazing view, but we deferred to the temperament in the car and only took pictures from a tourist look out (and Yaakov chose not to get out of the car).

It was now time to return to Old City for one last visit to the Kotel (Western Wall). After parking in the underground garage of the Mamilla Mall, we were heading through the complex toward the Old City when I had the distinct pleasure of running into my friend Ammi Dorevitch... with whom we had visited at the very beginning of our journey when we spent Shabbas in Yad Binyamin. We had time for a quick hug and a final photo op and then the kids bustled me onward toward the Old City. This was our final opportunity to daven at the Kotel (this trip), and we all took advantage of it.

After that, however, we wanted to figure out a way to keep the rest of the gang happy and entertained. First we decided to return to Chezkiahu’s (Hezekiah) Wall, which had been covered with an inflatable moon on July 2. We figured that since the light show was over we might be able to see it, but the “moon” was still there. However, we did take advantage of heading out of the Old City via the air conditioned Cardo and ran into a very cool, somewhat life-sized, painting of how the streets of Jerusalem would have looked in the days of the Romans.

Asher snagged this flag from a store.

We went back to pay!

Tour book in hand, I decided that the Old Train Station sounded like a nice way to finish our “touristing” for the day. I was pretty certain, based on Waze GPS, that it was a fairly direct path of walking to there, through Teddy Park. I was wrong. We were hot. We were tired. And we were accidentally right next to an awesome water park. We couldn’t figure out why a crowd of people with kids in swimsuits were gathering around. Finally we were told that starting in five minutes the floor would come alive with spouts of water. The water literally danced from the floor. The kids went in fully dressed, and we didn’t care. Ok, Avi kinda hesitated about the fully dressed thing, and Asher was actually rather scared at first, but then the big kids “escorted” him.  It was the best accidental tourist incident ever!

The day had been full and exhausting (mostly due to the heat). We headed back to our van and returned to the apartment to finish packing and get ready for dinner. For our farewell to Jerusalem dinner we went to Café Rimon and then strolled around the Ben Yehuda Street area picking up a few last minute items.

Sunday morning we rose bright and early and headed back to Montreal (and my mom back to Harrisburg)

Hope you all enjoyed following our journey!