Israel - Day 5

Holy Land Tour Day 5: Qumran, Masada, & the Dead Sea. 

Our first stop of the day...camel rides!  We loved it!!

Just a fun picture...Mom getting ready to ride on the camel...while I'm taking a picture with the camel.

When the camel first stands up, it is wild, but so cool...that is the reason for Joey's facial expression here.  So funny! 

Joey loved it, too.  So cool!

How the camel lets the rider off...

...what a neat experience!

Helen & me

Then, we headed to Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947. This is one of many ritual baths, not for getting clean, but for purity.

Another view of the ritual bath

There have been thousands of caves found so far...& 46,000 fragments of the Old Testament found in different caves.

Can you see the "holes"?  Those are the caves.

😍

Showing what one of the scrolls would look like...

After our time at Qumran, we headed to Masada, the desert fortress of King Herod. What a fortress this place was. Absolutely incredible!! This is our view before heading up to the fortress...& we are in our cable car to ride up to the top where the fortress is. (Can you see where the cable car would drop us off at the top?)

Up we go...in the cable car!!

Our view right when we got off at the top. (Can you see where we got on at the bottom? 😳). It was so high!!  150 feet above sea level...1,000 feet above the ground.

Art, Joey, & Ronnie...at the top of the fort.

Part of the fortress.

Everything in the picture that is below the black line is original. Above the line is restored. So, that is original coloring that Herod used.  So cool.

Us at the top. Can you see how far up it is??? 

Some of the fortress hasn’t been touched by archeologists so that as technology gets even better, they can learn even more in the future.

This is a storage room.

Another view from another angle at Masada. (That is the Dead Sea behind us to the left.) 

We walked to the Northern part of the Palace...

...and here we are standing at the Northern part of the Palace. 

CCC Isreal Tour 2019

Family

So much to see...these are original colors, mosaics, & tiles in the bath houses.

And, a bathhouse...

Some of us took the stairs down by the northern part of the palace to the lower level of the palace to where his bedroom would have been. Quite the stairs...

...but quite the view as we went down those stairs!

This is the group that took the stairs to the lower level king’s quarters. Look at all the original colors and pillars around us. Sooo cool!

Still at the lower level...sleeping quarters

We may have jumped into Ronnie & Marci's photo. 😉 

This is almost at the bottom of the stairs looking up (but definitely not anywhere near the bottom of the “mountain” by any means) that we took to look at the lower level before hading up.  When it was time to head back up to the top to take the cable car down, it was definitely more difficult to go back up all those stairs. Phew!

After the cable car ride back down, we headed over for a late lunch by the Dead Sea. Then, some of us decided to see what it would be like to float in the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. Our group of Dead Sea floaters..

What a crazy experience, but it’s true. You walk in (it’s very cold), slowly sit down, & you just float, back or belly. Just don’t let the salt water get in your mouth.

All the various facial expressions are hilarious.  It was so cool to literally float, but it was also very gross, too.  But, totally worth it!

What a super neat experience...& another fun filled day!