What goes up....

My time up North was excellent. This time, I stayed at HaGoshrim. It's similar to Kfar Giladi (where I was last week) and just about 10 minutes away. It's right up the road from Tel Hai. My room had a sliding door with a screen that opened onto a running stream. Across the stream were some of the kibbutz homes. There was a sort of plank bridge across the stream, and a sign that said "no crossing". So I didn't. (Why didn't Andrea cross the road?...)

When I got to my room last night I noticed a small spider by the light switch. An hour later he hadn't moved. I was not relieved to wake up in the morning and find that he had disappeared. I found him again wandering around the bathroom.

And here's what I don't get about Israeli hotel bathrooms (I promise to try and not make this a running theme) - I had a beautiful room, and it had a large bathroom with a jacuzzi tub. But, as I have frequently found in hotels here (in any kind of room), they give you the thinnest, barest, scratchiest towels. And while there was a shower set up in the bathtub, there was another one on the wall between the bathtub and toilet. There was a drain in the floor, but still, that made no sense to me at all.

Yesterday morning, I was with a bus that had an excellent tour educator. First we hiked on nearby Mt. Meron, where many of the rabbis who dabbled (understatement) in mysticism and kabbalah are buried. I got lost up there a few years ago on a hike, and true to form, our entire group got just a little lost on this trip. There are a lot of intersecting trails, and if you take the wrong one, you wind up on the wrong side of the mountain and/or at the military base down at the bottom. Like I said, I've had some experience with this.

After the tour of historic Tsfat,I had a chance to visit with Morris Dahan, a local artist, who caught me up on his family (his son and daughter will be celebrating their bar/bat mitvahs in September) and I got to see some of his new ideas that aren't yet sale-ready.

This morning was the drive back south to Jerusalem. True to form, I got a little lost when I arrived in Jerusalem. But I have a map and once I figured out where I was on it, made it back to the apartment pretty easily. First task - watering the orange tree on the balcony that has finally been resurrected (I'm in a holy city, I can use that language).