During the night, we were woken up by the little fridge in our hotel room. It started making a terrible noise & the whole thing was shaking which made our whole room shake. We unplugged it & tried to go back to sleep.
Then, at about 3am, an alarm went off in the girls' bedroom (it was so loud it woke us up too) & we could hear them frantically searching the room trying to figure out where it was coming from & how to stop it. I guess the guest before us had set an alarm for 3 on the alarm clock & set it to repeating. It took them a good 10 minutes to figure out
#1: How to turn it off &
#2: How to stop it from going off ever again!
At 6am, every single room in our group had their room phones going crazy. I guess our tour guide asked for a wake up call for us all & it literally sounded like fire alarms going off all down the hallway. There were 7 families all with 2-3 rooms each so it was kind of hilarious.
Trek got up around 5am & asked some of the other people in our group if they'd go running with him. They ran about 5 miles up to a lookout point overlooking the Sea of Galilee. It was beautiful at sunrise.
We all ate breakfast at 7am together in the buffet room. It was delicious. There were lots of breads, cheeses, fruit, yogurt, potatoes, pickled vegetables, & eggs. The kids ate a ton which was great.
We hopped on a bus & drove about 2 hours to Caesarea which is a port on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It's BEAUTIFUL there. King Herod built a beautiful palace on the sea as well as a port for trade. A lot of it is still standing. It's a wonderfully preserved archaeological site.
It's definitely Roman. You can see many fragments of Roman pillars, mosiacs, & statues all around this area. It was really cool.
This is the first underwater archaeological site I've been to. Most of this city/port still remains at the bottom of the sea. Archaeologists use scuba gear to recover a lot of the artifacts from this area. It's quite amazing.
The kids' favorite part of all of Day 2 was playing at the beach in Caesarea. Bladen loved to skip rocks with Trek, & the boys were obsessed with seashells & sea glass. It was SO beautiful. I think they would have stayed her all day if we let them. It was great seeing them have so much fun with their friends.
Out by the beach they discovered a chariot racetrack where King Herod would watch races. It was amazing that it was still there & in such good shape after 2000 years. Trek & some of the boys ran a race around the track.
This is near the racetrack where the King would have sat with his family & noblemen. They would be the closest to the action & be separated from the common folk.
The toilets in this city were VERY public. The road ran directly in front of them & I guess they'd just sit down & do their business while everyone passed by.
The most interesting part of this stop for me was this new find. Our tour guide said that this was discovered within a week of us getting there. The ground sunk in when someone stepped on it & there was a tunnel inside. Archaeologists have been excavating it all week & they think it was a prison where Herod held his prisoners when he lived here. That is significant because if this was indeed a prison, this would have been the very prison that Paul would have been locked in before he was sent to Rome. I'm so happy we happened to be there right as they were discovering this. It's SO neat.
Herod's palace was built right up on the water. We got to stand where his walls once stood. You can still see where his bedroom would have been & how it led out to his "private pool" in the sea. The outline of the pool is still visible. It's amazing.
If you look behind Lorien in this picture by Herod's palace, you can still see the dark areas where the port once was. Herod filled large crates with ash & rock, then would put them in the sea & let them sink to the bottom. He would do this over & over & over again, stacking these crates on top of each other until he had built a huge port for boats & large ships to dock on during his reign here. The crates still remain at the bottom of the sea here & you can still see them through the crystal clear water of the Mediterranean Sea.
We explored some more & found a huge Roman amphitheater. The upper half has been rebuilt to what it was back in Herod's day, but the first two rows & the floor is original to the 1st century. In the picture of all of us together, notice Canyon who is on the very top row. The stinker! He wanted to be at the very top.
We spent about 2 hours at Caesarea. It was really really wonderful. The Sea is gorgeous, the ruins were beautiful, & I loved the history!
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