Video

I compiled some video's from our trip into one video.  Sadly our hard drive broke half way through the trip so all the video is from the last half of our trip.  I tried to upload a high quality version on you tube but I couldn't get them to extend the length limit so here's the best I could do:)

Trip to Israel from Paul Brendemuhl on Vimeo.

Visiting Friends

We've spent the next week traveling all around the states visiting friends.

We spent the first night at the Hayes in Georgia.

 Then we spent the next night in Tennessee at Natalie's house.

We spent Shabbat at the Hood's in Tennessee.  The Hood's have 15 kids with 11 living at home so that was a lot of fun.  The little boys had fun on the tree swing.

The older kids played a crazy game of killer uno.

We spent Sunday night at the Hershey's home in Missouri.  It was Deborah's 16th birthday and Mr. and Mrs. Hershey had a beautiful cake waiting for her.

Granddad's 100th Birthday

December 2nd was my Great Granddad's 100th birthday.

Even though he's a hundred he still feeds the dog everyday and drives his golf cart to get the mail.

  We had a party for him on the 3rd.

My Uncle David and his family.

Granddad and his two sons.

Granddad with three of his grandkids.  Mom is pretending to have her arm around Aunt Carole, who couldn't be there:)

And their spouses.

Four generations.

Grandma and Grandpa Rogers

We spent a couple weeks in North Carolina at my Grandma and Grandpa Rogers house.

Grandma was always in the kitchen cooking and Grandpa cooked breakfast for us every morning.

The little kids were having fun dressing up in old wigs.

Grandma and Grandpa's new dog, Maisey, was a very popular dog while we were there.

The cat and her are good friends.

The boys spent a lot of time working on Grandpa's train set and after a few trips to the train store had it running.

Dad and the boys (and our tree climber Anna) spent a lot of time trimming trees.

It was my cousin, Brittany's, birthday while we were there.

She had her birthday party at a roller skating rink, which was a lot of fun.

We spent a night making cookies with our cousins.

Sarah had a lot of fun riding on Grandpa's horses and mules.

Our friends the Warrens came down to visit us while we were there so we saddled up the horses and mules and went for a ride.

How many people does it take to saddle up a horse?

Will had great trouble staying on his horse:)  Long story...

Sukkot

This post is a little out of place but I just found these pictures.  I mentioned it a little bit in a earlier post, but Sukkot is a week long celebration that is one of God's appointed celebrations in the Bible.  In the Bible it says the first and last days are days of rest and that you are supposed to live in boothes for the whole week.  It is celebrated by everyone in Israel and is a lot of fun. 

All the girls had their "booth" on the upstairs balcony.  We just put all our cots outside and put palm branches over them.  It was kinda cold. 

It was one big slumber party:)

Most of the people in our group stayed in the vineyard and made boothes in between the rows.  We spent a few evenings with them and one night they had all the instruments out and we had fun singing around the campfire.

The Flight Home

We spent our last couple day in the land at a friends house in Jerusalem.  They left the 24th but had rented the apartment till the end of the month which was when we were leaving.  So it worked out perfect for us to stay there.

We were all still sick so we spent most of the time there resting.

We spent one evening on Ben Yehuda street.

We had our last shwormas.

The last day we were there we had to be out of the apartment by ten in the morning so we spent the afternoon with the Kaspi's.  The dad works at the Wiseman Institute so we got to go up in the particle accelerator.

Most of us were better by the time we got on the plane but Sarah was still sick with a pretty bad cough.  All the little kids that were in the group we were with got it.

Benjamin thought Sarah made a great pillow.

At the airport in Tel Aviv the carts are free, but in Newark they're five dollars apiece!  So we were very loaded down with bags.

On the way to Grandma and Grandpa Rogers we spent the night at our friend the Schaefers.  On the way to their house we drove through Washington D.C.

We couldn't drive the motor home in front of the capitol building but we could see it down every street:)



We saw the back of the Lincoln Memorial...



And drove past the Arlington National Cemetery.  (As we got to Arlington Cemetery, we realized we were at the end of things to easily drive by in Wash. D.C. and we didn't know which way to turn to get to the Schaefer's house (our next stop).  We drove around the round-about about 3 times waiting for the GPS to tell us which way to go:)

I think this is the only picture we have from the Schaefers house.  Sad, we had fun.  We tried to remember all of the dances we learned in Israel around a fire that night.

The Galilee

We spent a week in the Galilee staying on a kibbutz near Afula. 

While we were there we spent a couple days just driving around and seeing the sites.

Fishing boat on the Galilee.

Nimrod's Castle

A view of the Golon Heights from Nimrod's Castle.

The Jordon valley has a TON of green houses on the Jordon side of the river.

We went to the ruins of Megido.  It's one of the most extensively dug-out ruins in Israel.

In what used the be the horse barn they had model horses.

It had a huge cistern.

We had Thanksgiving dinner the last night we were there with the family who volunteers at it.

While we were there everyone got sick so we spent most of our week there resting.