11/23/12 – The Red Eye

There was no rest for the wicked, namely me.  The seats on the plane were hard and uncomfortable, even worse, they didn’t recline.  The connecting flight out of Rome to Tel Aviv was no better.  By the time we reached Ben Gurion Airport I had been awake for well over 24 hours…I was spent.  But there was no time for sleeping, we still needed to get to our hotel in Tiberius.

While boarding our tour bus we met Amnon, our local guide and our bus driver Shuli.  Amnon was a passionate old soul that spoke in a long drawn out cadence that made even the most trivial detail about the topography sound interesting.  He literally told us that water tended to flow downhill, but he did it in such a way that everyone reacted as if he had made this amazing discovery of a thing we call gravity all by himself…including me.

Amnon went on to describe how he was named after the son of King David who was either killed or exiled because he had “taken advantage” of his half-sister Taron.  Stranger still, in some twisted interpretation of history Amnon had a granddaughter named Taron; not exactly the type of thing I would choose to broadcast if I were in his shoes, you know, on account of incest currently being out of fashion.

Night fell early and by the time we reached Tiberius after having crossed the Carmel range and descending to the Sea of Galilee it was completely dark.  Thick cloud cover and an almost complete lack of street illumination left us with only the headlights of the bus to guide our way.