The Lebanese Boarder

Alright! More pictures!!! The second place we went to after Tel Akko was a spot up by the Lebanese boarder. No worries, all is cool up there, so long as you don't try to cross it. :)

These cliffs are the dividing line. That tower there is part of the Israeli patrol...I think Israeli.

But this is the view! Look at the gorgeous coastline!!!

There were all kinds of rocks and caves. We didn't go into any of the caves, though.

More of the pretty coast.

There was a cable car that would take you into the caves. We thought really hard about whether or not we wanted to go down into them, but when Dennis said that the last time he was in there, it wasn't worth the money, we decided against it. He said nothing's as cool as Hezekiah's tunnel. Except maybe the Templar Tunnel, but as you saw in the last post, they've changed it and just not as cool now. I also liked the poor translations. hahaha.

There I am! Standing at the boarder!

And that's where I was just standing!

There were lots of people fishing. The beach here was real dirty, though. And really rocky. These rocks are called Karkar, or beach stone. I actually found a grinding stone in my square made out of karkar! Which means they were importing beach rock!

A wee little crab, caught between a rock and a hard place.

Haha, Eric looked so epic standing there like that, I had to take a picture.

I climbed way out to there to get a good look of the sea, but just as we all got to he beach, the tide started to come in. No sooner did I get out there that I was nearly knocked over by a wave. haha.

Ok ok, it wasn't a big wave, but it's hard to balance out there on those rocks! I did get a little wet.

The crashing waves...

Jason and Jessica were searching for tessera, which are tiny square-cut stones for mosaic flooring. If you look carefully, you can find it everywhere. That day they each found 6 or 7 pieces.

Man, I was enjoying the salty air. I miss the beach.

There were such pretty flowers there, too.

And a super cool lizard!!!

Oh, I've apparently reached the end of my pictures for here...erm...another post soon to follow!

Up next: Crusader Castles!!!

More of Galilee

Well, I'm most likely not going anywhere this weekend. This is a working weekend for staff. Nuts. Tomorrow, though, we're going to rub elbows with some of our financial donors and some staff from other digs at a reception at the American Colony in Jerusalem. Next weekend is a party at the Rockerfeller Museum in Jerusalem for staff from all the digs in Israel. yay, networking! haha.

Anywho, here are some more Galilee pics. These are from a city called Akko right on the Mediterranean coast! It's gorgeous!!!

First we went to Tel Akko. That's what the sign in Hebrew says. It has an occupation similar to Gezer's: settlement from Early Bronze to Middle Bronze with a slump in Late Bronze, and a huge rebuild during the Iron Age and Hellenistic period. Though not much excavation has been done and there's not much to see.

Walking up the Tel. In the blue shirt is Eric Mitchell, our head of survey. Behind him are Jason and Jessica.

A view across the Tel to the Med.

A hotel in Akko. Across the bay is Haifa!

I just thought it was funny that everyone was taking a picture of the same view a the same time. The man in the forefront of the photo is Byron, another of our supervisors. He's leaving tonight. So sad.

It's soooo green in Galilee. This picture could almost be mistaken for Bethlehem, PA or Allentown, eh?

Oh yea, Akko was also a taken as a part of the Republic of France during Napoleon's wars or whatever.

See? Napoleon. And Marcella. haha.

Um...you can't really see it because it's been severely neglected over the years, but this is the "sondage" of the excavations at Tel Akko. That means it's a deep, long trench showing each stratigraphic layer of occupation there.

More of the sea...*sigh*

We had waited a long long time for Dennis (our tour guide for the day and also one of our den mothers back at camp). We thought he'd went off to wonder more of the areas that had been excavated (I believe he had been a part of it at one point...). Turns out he made his way back down through another route and was waiting for us at the bottom. hahahaha.

A little further into the day led us back to Akko. I'm organizing according to location rather than the sequencing of how our day went.

We wandered and wandered trying to find the underground tunnel, but Denise couldn't find it. It had been 10 years since he'd been there. While waiting for him for a bit, we saw a bird nest on the roof above us with some tiny baby birds in it, screeching away. The nest is literally hanging from the ceiling!

Finally, we found it! the Templar Tunnel!!! It was used as an emergency evacuation route to the sea during times of siege. But they started us at a strange point and you can no longer go through the whole thing - only a very short portion of it.

I thought the translation was funny. They spelled "attention" wrong and then used "then" when they should have used "than".

Low ceiling...

Really low ceiling. I was sad we couldn't walk through the water like we could in Hezekiah's tunnel in Jerusalem.

And it led out to the sea!!!

The bay. On the other side is Haifa, again. And there was a sail boat! haha.

Lesley, fawning over the sight of the sea.

Akko has massive fortification walls around it that plunge into the sea. This is a view looking into the harbor...

...and the view looking out.
I guess if you're clever enough, you can make your way down along the fortification wall and go fishing.

The remains of Akko's massive citadel which protected the city.

And a light house!!!!

A Franciscan monastery!

This would have been part of the city's protective arm of the harbor, but now there's just the statue of a whale. haha.

The remains. If you follow the wall arm way out there, you can see a huge wall that's surrounded by water. It would have been the tower.

Oh, here's a close up of it.

There are stairs leading down to the water! Or up to the wall, however you'd like to see it. Potato, potato.

Sometimes Akko is spelled Acre. I don't know why because the Hebrew is clearly Akko (AKV).

The modern harbor. Lots of boats!

More boats.

A pretty looking mosque.

And lastly, this was a monastery or something. Dennis told us that you used to be able to go into the court yard and go up the stairs, but now everything is blocked off. The pillars are real granite and marble from Florence! It's difficult to tell, but Grammom, you can sort of make out the red and green colors of the pillars like which were on the facade of the Duomo in Florence!

Ok, I still have three more locations to show you all, but unfortunately I think I've been online for like 3 hours. I haven't been able to get online all week because I've been so busy. I had a lot of things to check up on. But now I must try to keep up with paperwork, so time to work. I'll try to get on later (though after pool time!) to put up some more pictures from last weekend.

Oh yea, and Happy 4th of July, everyone!!!