One Epic Fail and a couple epic sucesses

We've been in the south. the land of nothing...and i mean nothing except a strange balloon floating over the Dimona power station (aka nuclear something) and lots of rocky desert.

Internet for A's competition brief was found by driving around the moshav (neighborhood like a kibbutz but where everyone owns their own stuff) clicking the "find networks" button until we could pirate some poor unsuspecting unsecured network.

We stayed in a place called the Dumela African Village....a quaint little b&b run by a woman from South Africa. It was clean and cute...with pirate-able wifi and hot water. What more can you ask for in the Negev/Arava deserts??



We spent our two days there seeing the sites around the Dead Sea:

1. Massada: where the Jewish Zealots killed themselves rather than succomb to the invading Romans who were busy trying to build a GIANT ramp to get to them...since they were camped out at the top of a big ass mountain.

We hiked back down while the parentals took the cable car back. there were a lot of people hiking up..more power to them, it was warm and its a long climb...like stair master from hell.





2. Ein Gedi: Its a nature reserve and spring...we just hiked out to the spring part.








The epic fail came when we were in Eilat on the Red Sea and decided it would be fun to go across the border into Jordan. We got to the international terminal thing, walked in and realized that it was FULL of tourists...who incidentally spread their group thru all the lines and when one gets to the front the other twenty all suddenly cut in. Please, imagine for yourself all the four letter words in three languages i could come up with. turns out, you can't just walk back out. The people behind the counter have to stamp a piece of paper for you to get out. So, an hour later and thoroughly irritated, we decided to call it quits and hang out on the beach.

The epic success involved a sunset camel riding trip, campfire in the desert and the fulfillment of A's one adventure request:

More details on all these things later when life gets boring and i need stories to rehash. Today was Jerusalem and here's a little montage. If you look carefully at the bazaar shot..there's a car driving thru:

This guy was making suits.  The last photo is the Dome of the Rock mosque.