The Month in Pictures

Lots of travel, holiday festivities and computer glitches have made us slow to post pictures. So here is our last couple of months in pictures - think of those end-of-the-year double issues of magazines that only have ads and pictures so that the writers can have a vacation.

Thanksgiving weekend - we were in Tel Aviv and went to a drive-thru safari. All the animals were free to run at you except the lions. I feel like I have seen nature shows about charging rhinos but the threat must not be that great because they had a lot of them just walking around.

Duffy's parents visited in early December and we all enjoyed Masada - site of a defiant mass suicide by Zealots (yes, the original "Zealots") after a long siege. Better dead than Roman! Grim tale, but it also has nice weather, a cable car, falafel and a pretty view of the Dead Sea.

Last week, we had two days off for Eid. Continuing our "sacred ground" tour, we organized an outing for colleagues up to Umm Qais, in the far northwest corner of Jordan. Palestinians expelled from their lands come up here for the spectacular views, and to weep over the lost Golan Heights (see the lake and fields behind us), a strategic - and lovely! - piece of land lost by Syria to Israel in the 1967 war. On the plus side, Umm Qais has a nice restaurant, roman ruins and look! It's green!

After driving way North to go to Umm Qais, we drove south along the Dead Sea to the Feynan Eco-Lodge in the desert near Petra. Here's an inconvenient truth: anyone who thinks that solar is going to save us from global warming has not spent much time in solar-powered lodging. In fact, one chilly solar-"heated" shower is plenty to bring one to his senses on the matter. This is the desert, after all. We followed instructions and waited til dusk to shower on a very sunny day, and still the water was barely heated. The electricity worked only 2 hours past dark and it was cold, cold, cold. During the day, we had some great hikes and were offered helpings of recently slaughtered sheep by Eid-celebrating bedoins.