Margoa Arad

Nous avons tres peu dormi la nuit passee. Miss Laurelie a fait des siennes jusqu'a 1hr du matin et comme j'ai bu trop de cafe, j'ai eu de la diificulte a dormir. Nous nous sommes arretes ici a Rolla, Missouri, peu apres avoir passe la barre des 2000 km. Nous ressentons deja la chaleur, l'air clim ...

... outdoor; a sports arena with lots of games to play and an adult lounge with WiFi. Plus a little general store and small cafe. The new huge clubhouse is still under construction after having burnt down last year. In spite of having many nice features, including modern clean bathhouses, it wasn't much to my liking, in that it was so spread out. Also, the area where we were could use quite a ...

... station. We spent the next 4 hours there while the mechanic replaced the radiator and off we went... another 15 miles. It overheated again. We then had to get it towed back to Rolla, same mechanic. He met us and locked the Jeep up in their garage for the night and we walked a block to the Best Western. No pictures...

... we started in Masada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada ; [31.315862,35.356094]) an acient fortress which was destroyed in one of the roman-jewish wars. It was quite a nice location but a huge bunch of turiusts:D korean, dutch, german and and and the interesting fact about that place is that 1000 habitants of that fortress (50% women and children) commited suicide when they realized that the falll of the defence was falling ...

17 April - 22 June 1989 On 17 April, 1989, I left home for good. Home for me was Buffalo, NY. I am very proud of where I grew up, but I always knew that I'd leave. And that I did. Since leaving, I have returned on occasion, but this journey, for me, was the real beginning of my life. It's almost 19 years to the day that I left home, so starting this ...

... afternoon, and it felt really good, as it was still very hot here - but it cooled off a LOT last evening, and the humidity is pretty well gone. Today, it was a perfectly beautiful, top-down kind of day, so we drove to the town of Hermann, about 30 minutes away. Hermann was a German settlement established in the mid-1800's - the biggest surprise is that America's first award-winning ...

... Israel only the rich people drive SUVs.

It was a hot day, for a while we were driving with full air condition blowing freezing air on our chests, while the sun was shining through the windshield burning our faces; a strange feeling. The Sodom-Arad road is long and winding through the desert, very dangerous but with beautiful desert scenery. We saw the Bedouin, camels, mountains and stopped at a ...

... All of us prayed shacharit with the sun rising behind our backs revealing the ruins of our last ancestors to stand up to the Romans before us. All fit in whatever sweatshirts and pants we could scrape together from the collection of clothes some of us thought to store in our backpacks we began our 4 hour experience atop Masada. We saw palaces, cisterns, a synagogue, a kosher (by today's standards even) mikveh, and walked in the footsteps of some of the ...

... and finally she let us go hiking with Yael and Simon (the Bedouin, but actually we just found out his name is really Salimon), Michael ended up being in the other place. So we got to hike with them, cut some of the plants away from some of the trails, pick up trash and go swimming in some of the springs, it was definitely a very fun and relaxing day. Only bad thing that happened with me, while trying to out do the Bedouins crazy climbing skills and climb up a huge rock, I ...

... a little, I guess because we'd gone into what I like to refer to as the "Israeli travel bubble" - none of us had been watching the news or paying attention to the matzav since arriving. People back home hear the news a lot sooner than people in Israel; while there, we simply don't feel it. It's as though there's no real security threat even despite the news reports. I mean, there were soldiers everywhere with guns (four on our bus - one security ...