Michelle Bowman, ARC/GNY Assistant Director of Training and Logistics, writes about her historic trip to Israel to work as an MDA Ambulance Responder.

Friday marked the second day of our ill-fated northern Israel adventure. We woke up early and set off on foot to wander through Tzafed. We grabbed some amazingly good Israeli pastries, still hot from the oven, and then headed out to see the artists' village. (I also learned my lesson from the freezing previous day and purchased a wool hat, a scarf, and an umbrella.) Today the sun was out, and so were the artists—small shops filled with an astounding variety of local artwork lined the beautiful white stone streets. Although we couldn"t afford to buy anything, it was quite fun to wander through. We did make quite a few purchases at the Tzafed candle shop, which included large, carefully crafted wax figures. Afterwards, we stopped at a few of the more prominent synagogues to experience the religious side of Tzafed before hitting the road.

By noon we were again navigating the mountain roads as we headed back down to Tiberius, the largest town on the Sea of Galilee. On the way we stopped by two major sites. First, we saw the Mount of Beatitudes, a major Christian site and supposedly the place where Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount and chose his disciples. Unfortunately, the gates were closed, so we tried to get as many pictures of the church as possible through the metal fence. We then headed to a site that we dubbed "the Jesus Boat”. In the late 1980s, two fishermen discovered a boat in the Sea of Galilee that had been stuck in the mud for about 2000 years. Amazingly, the boat was still preserved, so it became a major tourist attraction, popular among Christian pilgrims who believe that Jesus himself probably rode in a similar boat around the same time period. The entire site was interesting, if a bit hokey. We enjoyed the beautiful views of the Sea of Galilee much more than the boat itself, but it was a nice stop.

Finally, we made it to Tiberius, a somewhat generic seaside town that was obviously quite active in the summer, but fairly quiet in the winter months. Tiberius didn’t have many sites that we were interested in seeing, so we had a nice meal, checked our email, and enjoyed another quiet night. We also tried, without success, to procure a guide for our tour of the Golan Heights the next day. After our hotel receptionist offered to hire us a taxi, we decided to create our own, self-guided tour. One person would drive, one person would navigate, and the others would read out of our two dueling guidebooks. By this point, we had great confidence in our navigating skills; after all, it seemed unlikely that we would accidentally wander into Syria, Jordan, or Lebanon.

Saturday started with a drive to Ya’ar Yehudiyya Nature Reserve, where we planned to go for a short hike. We found a ranger who gave us a map with some good trails, did some stretches, and were ready to go. Unfortunately, just as we started walking it started to rain. And pour. Fortunately we were all prepared with rain jackets and umbrellas, but the trail quickly turned into solid mud. Every 10 we had to stop to brush off the mud that was caked on our shoes. But once again we forged on, undeterred by the weather.

It was a good thing that we did continue on; after about 30 minutes the rain stopped, the sun came out, and the hike was gorgeous. The spectacular landscape of this area was generally grassy plains interrupted by small rocks. However, these plains were interrupted by deep caverns, and the climax of our hike was an enormous waterfall that appeared out of nowhere. The landscape was gorgeous, and we all enjoyed spending some time outdoors.

After the hike we had a brief adventure trying to find food and gasoline in rural northern Israel on the Shabbat, but eventually we prevailed. (We also had a fun encounter with nature when we found a stray donkey in the restaurant parking lot.) By then it was well after noon, so we quickly continued on our whirlwind tour of the Golan Heights. We drove north to Mt. Bental, which boasted an amazing lookout tower with views (supposedly) over the borders into Syria and Lebanon, as well as miles and miles of beautiful countryside. We also utilized the lookout point to learn a bit more about the area’s fascinating history. However, the mountain was absolutely freezing (and the sun was threatening to start going down), so we quickly continued north.

We drove to the base of Mt. Herman, Israel’s snow-packed highest peak, and detoured through some Druze villages. The Druze are mysterious branch of Shi’ite Muslims who believe they are the sole custodians of a religious doctrine hidden from the rest of the world. The villages looked decidedly different from the other Israeli towns we had passed through, and decidedly more Arab. We read stories about Druze who stood on the border and shouted messages to their relative in Syria through bullhorns, but unfortunately we could not find any evidence that this actually occurs. (We still have differing opinions about the truth of this story.)

Our last stop was supposed to be Nimrod’s Fortress, an enormous fortress that was supposedly built on the top of the mountain by Nimrod the Giant so that he could send arrows up to God. As the sun set over the beautiful Israeli mountains, we could all understand why Nimrod believed that this was the place where he would be closest to God. After a few wrong turns, and an unexpected trip to a dairy plant, we found Nimrod’s Fortress only to discover that it had closed about 30 minutes ago. Once again, we stopped, took numerous pictures through the large gate, read about the history from our guidebooks, and considered the trip a success. Leaving from the northern tip of Israel, we enjoyed the long trip back to Jerusalem, where we promptly fell asleep.