After visiting Mount Carmel, it was time to eat some lunch. We stopped at a cute little cafe restaurant. Our tour cost included breakfast & dinner, but we had to pay for our own lunches. The cafe was set up like a buffet & the cost was $15 per person. (And this was our cheapest lunch meal the entire trip.)
It was good. We had more falafel, schnitzel (which we cut up & told all the kids on the trip that they were chicken nuggets), salad, LOTS of pickled veggies (my favorite was the highlighter yellow cauliflower), hummas, veggies, & some sort of amazing juice that I wish I could find again. The juices in the middle east are INCREDIBLE.
After lunch, we piled back in our tour bus & headed to the Megiddo Valley. We were going to Armageddon!
Revelation 16:16
"And he gathered them (the nations) together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon."
Megiddo is quite spectacular from an archaeology viewpoint. Over 30 civilizations have been excavated here. . . one on top of the other in 30 layers. The civilizations cover pretty much every time period of human history. They dig up one civilization, clear it out & put it somewhere else (on display) , then dig down further & find a whole other civilization. They do this over & over & over again THIRTY TIMES. What an incredible piece of history!
It was fun just walking through the active dig site. You can literally see all the layers. . . from where the hill originally stood to where it's be excavated today. If you look out over the valley you can see that there's still several meters more to dig. It's insane.
We also got the opportunity to go down into the water cistern & tunnels underneath Megiddo. It was very exciting for both the kids & the grown ups.
It was a very exciting end to a long day of travel & exploration. In Israel, most things close by 3 or 4 in the afternoon every day so we learned that in order to see everything we wanted to see, we had to cram it all in by 4pm. Our tour guide was wonderful about planning every day perfectly so we could see it all.
Friday at sundown Shabbat begins. (That is the Jewish Sabbath.). NOTHING happens from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown. No stores were open, no restaurants were open, NOTHING. Our tour guide told us to shop if we wanted to BEFORE the sun set.
We arrived back at the hotel around 4:30 & walked to the mall just around the corner from the hotel. We explored a little bit, stopped by a grocery store to buy some bread & peanut butter for lunches the next day, then went back to the hotel before sundown for our buffet dinner. After dinner, we all met down in the lobby & played board games for a few hours before bed. It was a perfect end to a perfect day.
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