Day 13

The Last big day... Tomorrow, we will still spend the entire day in Jerusalem/Tel Aviv for departure so today is like the last day, really. Since we didn't get to see the Dead Sea Scrolls yesterday, our Selwyn said that we would add it on for the last day. So we began our journey to Massada which meant having to drive along the coast of the Dead Sea for about 45 min. Incredible. It just kept going! Much larger than I thought, but at the same time if you look at it on a man, you can see how large it actually is. Also, it's much smaller today that it was a thousand years ago. Waterline is receding like crazy :( So we arrive to the bottom of the large mount where Massada is and where King Herrod built his palace. Lawrence of Arabia was filmed up there? So it took a huge gandola to take us from the bottom of the mountain to the top (which isn't even as hard of a climb as Cowells Montain to put it into perspective. So we got to the top and it was pretty awesome thinking back to when it was first built and how incredible it was to make the mountain itself part of the palace but what is left to look at just isn't what I expected? There was still beautiful mosaic left on some floors and it is pretty huge. HOw they got all that stone up that mountain... geesh. After that we stopped in Qumran for lunch and shopping. Here we got all our "Ahava" dead sea products. Qumran is where the dead sea scrolls were found in the caves. Seriously right on the dead sea. After that we rushed on over to a beach site to take a swim/float! We only had 45 min to change, float/get muddy/take pictures, shower and get cleaned up. We did it! It was so simple and such a small chunk of time but it was seriously one of the highlights of the trip. So much fun. Falling in the quick sand like pits and getting disgusting water in your mouth, rubbing mud all over you, taking fun floating pictures. It was just great. I loved ever second of it! RInsed the salt off myself and hopped on the bus! Last stop the Israel Museum where they have the "HOLY BOOK Exhibit." Unfortunately, stupid Selwyn took forever with talking too much about stuff I cared less about and that meant that we seriously only had about 60 seconds of exhibit time to talk quickly passed some dead sea scroll writings and that was it, we had to go. Shame on us for not asking him up front where they were so we could skip all his bs. Oh well. We did it, mom did it and it was great. Beautiful trip. What a gift.