Today involved a lot of driving. A lot. We hit the road at 5:45 AM, leaving our hotel at Petra. We had to reach the border crossing between Israel and Jordan by about 10 AM, because that crossing was closing early today. (It’s the tail end of the Passover holiday.)
We arrived at the King Hussein Bridge (also famous as the “Allenby Bridge,” named after the great British general who figures in Lawrence of Arabia) on time, but things were more than a little chaotic, and it took us quite a while to get through both Jordanian and Israeli security. (I’m not surprised. Sometimes things go well and easily here. Sometimes, unaccountably, they don’t.)
We had a quite good buffet lunch in Jericho, in the occupied West Bank (at a Palestinian tourist center cleverly called “Temptation,” after the nearby Mount of Temptation, the traditional site where Jesus was tempted by the Devil for forty days and forty nights).
Then we headed up into the Judean hills toward Jerusalem. We tried to avoid Jerusalem holiday traffic by going slightly around the city to the north, but our plotting was to no avail. We were still snared in a bad suburban traffic jam.
Finally, though, we got down onto the fertile coastal plain of Israel and reached our hotel in Tel Aviv.
Here, we met the rest of our group. There will be a flotilla of three buses, each of them furnished with an Israeli Palestinian guide — the laws here require a licensed Israeli guide — and an LDS commentator. (I’m one of the latter, of course. The other two are Brent Top, the dean of Religious Education at BYU, and Jack Welch, the founder of FARMS and the editor of BYU Studies.) We’ll be traveling in a pack, meeting at sites, and so forth.
Festivities begin tomorrow in earnest. Now I need to sing for my supper.
Posted from Tel Aviv, Israel
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