From the northeastern shore of Kinnereth

New, in today’s edition of the Deseret News:

“A Latter-day Saint presence in the Holy Land”

***

I don’t typically stay in luxury hotels such as this one, the Setai Hotel in En Gev, Israel, located on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee (or, more accurately and locally, Lake Tiberias or Kinnereth).  But this is a special tour.

As I say, my wife and I are over here accompanying members of the National Advisory Council to the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University.  I’m one of the three “scholars” helping to take the group around, along with Jack Welch and Kent Jackson.  Each of us is assigned to one of the three buses; we will rotate buses periodically.  The Cruise Lady company has three of its people here, along with Michael Ballam and his wife Vanessa and the new dean, the associate deans, the assistant deans, and some other staff from the Marriott School.

This is a very nice tour, meticulously planned, with excellent food and accommodations.  (Generally, our lodging and eating are okay, but much more utilitarian.)  It’s interesting to see how the Marriott School treats its major donors, how it builds relationships with them and among them, and a sense of esprit.

As usual, I’m not being paid for this — but, yes, they’re picking up the tab for our hotel and our food.  I would scarcely come on such trips as this if I had to pay my own expenses.  Although I find these expeditions enjoyable — I love to introduce people to places and topics that have interested me all my life — I would, if I were paying the costs myself, choose to travel on my own rather than to be responsible for commentary at sites each long day and on the bus trips between them.

The weather is getting hot.  (I don’t think that I’ve ever before been in the Galilee area at this season of the year, or when it’s been this warm.  I’m told that Tiberias was 104 degrees today, and that it will be 108 degrees tomorrow.)  But our buses are kept well stocked with water and are well air conditioned, and it will be quite endurable.

Today, we spent time, among other places, at Caesarea Maritima, at the ancient aqueduct that delivered water to it, at a “Druze restaurant” on Mount Carmel, at the traditional site on Carmel where Elijah had his famous contest with the priests of Baal, at the Baha’i Gardens that surround the Shrine of the Bab in Haifa, and at the German cemetery in Haifa where two late nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint missionaries and several members of the old Haifa Branch are buried.  (See the column to which I link above.)  It was a pleasant day, I think, although I seem to be combating a reappearance of my old cold or allergy from Egypt.

Posted from En Gev, Israel