Jet Laaaaag
For our second day in Israel we decided to take it easy. Man were we wrong.
I popped out of bed when I heard Will crying. I felt pretty good. Thought it was about 5AM-ish. Went and got the boy and brought him to our room only to realize it was actually 11:30PM. Blerg!
My eye had been bothering me since the flight. I figured it was just the dry recirculated air. Somewhere around 3AM Will was wide awake and my eye was glued shut. Yuck! I got up tried to de-booger my eye. The extent of which freaked me out enough to go downstairs do a little “conjunctivitis after LASIK” googling and knockout an email to my LASIK doctor. Then back to bed.
The alarm went off right about the time I think I finally hit some REM sleep. Thanks, husband. The eye was looking better so I was at least happy about that.
Then joy of joys vomit struck! The boy managed to get sick on our bed, his bed and the couch all before 9AM. That was fun. I think it was the jet lag (I’ll not leave you in suspense – he’s fine now).
We had our first real experience driving and went up the coast to Haifa, an old port city, about an hour away. Also, where one of Dave’s co-workers was located while he was waiting to catch a boat out to a rig. We decided to liberate him from hotel life and took him off on our excursions. Will puked a few more times in the car on the way there, mostly just spit and bile. This was, fortunately, the last of the sickness. Also, we are thankful that we had the forethought to bring a puke bucket in the car. SBW used it like a champ.
Now, at this point, you may think we are horrible people for dragging our sick child around a foreign country but I’ve hung out with a sick kid long enough to know that sick in the apartment or sick on the road is still sick and still no fun. If anyone was going to suffer it was going to be the person on whom he was riding. That person would be me. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably have puke down my back at some point that day. Once you accept a worst case scenario it just doesn’t seem that un-doable. So, off we went.
We took the scenic route to Gary’s very inconveniently located hotel, then we took the scenic route to Meggido (fortunately, it was only a little scenic). Meggido is ruins of an old well-used fort. Pretty cool stuff. Would have been super awesome if the wee one would have gotten a bit more use out of his feet. On a side note, Meggido is in the middle of nowhere but our handy-dandy guide book said it had a cafeteria, so we decided to just eat whatever was there. Indeed it did and it was excellent. Probably a little over priced but a heckuva lot better than Luby’s (no offense to Luby’s I still love your mac and cheese).
Side note: This is a blog and not a history lesson so I’ll try to be light on the exposition and just let you do your own Googling on the sites mentioned along the way. Besides, I’m long winded enough without going all history major on you! You’re welcome.
After, Meggido we drove to Nazareth. It’s a surprisingly large town and we saw the Basilica of the Annunciation (where Gabriel came to Mary and explained how she would become “in the family way”) and the Church of St. Joseph (which houses Joseph’s workshop). We were directed, on our way to the basilica, through a souk (market) and I was again amazed at how many people it takes to hawk so much useless crap.
On our way out we managed to swing by a coffee shop to grab some drinks (it is so freaking dry over here, it’s like a desert or something) and SBW got to pick out two pastries (we love him like that). The first one was covered in powdered sugar the second was a chocolate cookie with some pink swirl of fluffy sugar icing on top. I tried to discreetly pick the pastry with the least amount of powdered sugar on it (seeing as he was riding in the carrier on my back) but he totally caught me and pretty much opted out of eating that one – oh, darn guess Mommy gets a snack too!
When pastry time was over we got the car and headed back to Haifa to drop Gary off. There wasn’t a whole lot we wanted to sight see in Haifa. It’s the world headquarters to the Ba’hai Faith so they have an amazing temple and gardens that go up a mountain. Truly some impressive gardening. The shrine is supposed to be really cool but we were much more interested in checking out the German Colony because Germans make beer and after hiking across the ancient world a beer sounded pretty awesome.
We found a pretty cool restaurant that had a huge metal spider on a web lit with LEDs and a disco ball. Dave and Will and I had hummus with meat. It was awesome. We were thinking it would be a snack but we never really ate again so I guess it was dinner. Gary ordered a burger. It was the biggest burger I have seen in a long time. We were there awhile.
After we got our German on we dropped Gary and headed back to the apartment in Herzliya Pituach. It should have been the end of the night but no, there was more…
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