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.

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.

Sde Boker

After Shiloh we spent a week at Sde Boker visiting our friends the Glik's and Travis's.  They have a wonderful community of believers.  The Glik's have seven beautiful home schooled children and we had the most wonderful time with them.

The little kids had fun making mud pies.

Sarah was very proud of hers.

They live by a very beautiful canyon.

One day we went to a friends farm and helped with his horses.

Afterwards we got to ride the horses.

The Dig at Shiloh

Trip Note: It's been a while since I've posted, I'll try get caught up soon, but right now we've been back in the states for a couple weeks now at Grandma and Grandpa Rogers and traveling around visiting people all over the states.  At the moment we're in Kansas City, MO.  We'll be heading up to Grandma Effie's in ND today and we'll be staying there for about a week till we head back up to AK.

The group we were with took over the dig at Shiloh while we we're there.  Every week they put a new group of people there to dig.  It was a lot of fun.

David and Benjamin were very excited about the first big piece of pottery they found.

There we're two spots we worked at.  The one we spent most of our time at we started so we spent the first day just picking up pottery but after that we were uncovering walls and bigger pots.

The other place had already been worked on a lot and we were uncovering bigger things like olive presses.

Every once in a while we'd find a weird bug.  We found a few scorpions.

Dad had the most interesting find.  He dug up a unexploded artillery shell used in WW1.  The IDF sent a bomb squad and we all got evacuated while they blew it up.

Here we're all waiting for them to blow it up.

On Friday we got to go pick Olives for our first and last time.