It’s difficult for me to say which day of this tour itinerary is my favorite. But today is surely among them. (Is any day actually not?)
We went out on the Sea of Galilee this morning, and Jack Welch, Brent Top, and I spoke briefly to the combined bus groups on a boat floating on a very calm lake.
Then we went to Magdala, a new favorite spot of mine. A superb site-specific guide — a woman from South Africa — showed us around the area. Marvelous.
Then we went to the so-called “Primacy of Peter,” a small church set amid beautiful grounds right on the shore of the lake. This is a traditional site for Christ’s first Galilean meeting with the apostles after his resurrection.
Next came Capernaum, another of my very favorite places in all of Israel. (Here’s the main reason why: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700038919/Capernaum-bears-witness-of-Christ.html?pg=all)
Then to Bet She’an, a huge and spectacular Greco-Roman city — like Jerash, in Jordan, one of the ten cities of the so-called “Decapolis” — that also plays a role in the Old Testament. It is, for example, the place where the bodies of King Saul and his son Jonathan were hanged on the city wall after their deaths at the hands of the Philistines in the mountains of Gilboa.
After Bet She’an, instead of returning to Tiberias as we usually do, we continued southward to stay in the Jericho Resort Village, in territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. It’s the best hotel we’ve stayed in on this trip since we left Jordan. Maybe the best of the trip altogether. I’m enormously pleased to see this sort of facility in Palestinian territory. And I’m happy that it’s right next door to an old favorite site — the ruins of the hunting place of the eighth-century Umayyad caliph Hisham. We won’t have time during this trip to revisit that fascinating site, but I now know that a very comfortable new hotel stands immediately next door to it, which gives me ideas.
Another fun thing: After settling in at the hotel and having dinner, we went over to visit a very nice tourist shop by the Mount of Temptation. It’s only been open for about 2.5 weeks. I’m not much of a shopper, but it was impressive. And, uncharacteristically, we laid out an impressive sum (for us, anyway), on Palestinian-made glassware. I feel especially good about it because I’m happy to do something to support the Palestinian economy here in Jericho. I’m glad to see such facilities beginning to appear.
Posted from Jericho, Palestine
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