Spectator sports and wildlife

On the way out of Jerusalem Monday morning we got stopped for a good 30 minutes just at the edge of the old city. Traffic was just stopped. About 10 cars up we saw a police van and lights so we figured there was an accident. So we waited. And waited. And then we saw the little robot.

Evidently there was an unknown box on the side of the road and they brought out the little robot that checks on all unidentified packages and can blow them up if necessary. I should point out that one of my passengers had gotten out of the car to walk up and see what was going on. When he saw the robot come out, her RAN back to the car.

As far as we could tell, it was a box of water bottles and there was nothing that they needed to blow up. Which was good, but as a spectator not nearly as interesting.

And once again, I drove up the Bika road. I'm not really sure how that should be spelled in English.... It was particularly nice day and since it rained last week, there was a bit more green on the hills than usual. We saw a lot of wildlife - more than I'd seen on my two previous trips up.

First, there were the camels. A huge herd of them. Maybe a hundred scattered across both sides of the road. None in the road, which was good. And then we saw tree baby camels. Not just teenagers, but baby camels. Really, really cute. I'm pretty sure the cars behind me were annoyed that I slowed down as much as I did.

And then there were goats. And donkeys. And sheep.

And then we got into the hillier area approaching the foothills of the Golan. The hills are greener and very rocky with big boulder-y rocks just sitting around. More sheep, more goats. And then, just when we though we were passing another group of rocks, we realized that they were big cows (steer?) sitting down in the sun. White ones and brown ones and all really, really big.

They blended in well with the rocks, although I'm not sure that they necessarly think in terms of trying to fit into their environment to evade predators. I can't really see them as camoflage cows...