Caesarea by the Sea

Hello Grandkids Family and Friends

After visiting a small museum about the history of Tel Aviv, we took another taxi about 20 miles north to our next hotel in the city of Natanya where our tour group would be arriving late Tuesday night.  Bob and Kathy along with Kathy’s sister Joan and Terry were arriving from Paris where they had been visiting Karen and Rob and their girls Lucy and Amelia.  They arrived in time to have dinner together.  Most of our hotels have breakfast and dinner buffets for us to eat- a large assortment of good food and desserts.  If we want to be adventurous we can try many new things. One funny rule (part of Kosher food restrictions) is that coffee with milk is served for breakfast, when no meat is served, but coffee is not served with dinner or dessert because meat is served at dinner.  I wanted coffee but had to buy it outside the dining room and sneak it in- I decided that was too much work and have made coffee later in my room instead. The hotel was a resort and this part of town is very recent- many tall apartment buildings within the past 10 years.

We began our group tour of Israel by returning to Joppa and going to a different museum at the university with artifacts showing how they crushed grapes and pressed olives and built stone houses and towns- archaeology finds.  Judy and I took a quick look inside a museum with arts and crafts of Israel- with many artifacts from synagogues- which added to the Jewish things that we had seen at the other museum.  The rest of the group was going up a hill to look at an archaeological dig site- rocks and mud.  We are apparently going to be looking at lots more rocks and building blocks.

In the afternoon we went to Caesarea which was a harbor constructed with stone blocks and underwater cement (a Roman invention) and a palace and other houses and buildings.  It was built by Herod who was the Roman governor at the time that Jesus was born.  Herod wanted a palace at the coast because he didn’t like living in the Jerusalem heat.  He built an amphitheater and a stadium for chariot races- like in Ben-Hur.  Ships from Rome brought supplies and civilized articles to his outpost kingdom. The crusaders built a castle here as a defensive outpost for the men coming off ships on their way to Jerusalem. The city and the castle was covered by sand dunes and so they were preserved from destruction by people who would have taken the stones to use for new buildings.  The highlight for me was a section of the 18-mile aqueduct that brought water from springs on Mt. Carmel to the north. It was also covered with sand until 1920.  This was our first visit to a first century town this is mentioned in the Bible.  A centurion soldier named Cornelius invited Peter to his house to teach him and his family and friends about Jesus (Acts 10).  So our Bible Lands tour has begun!