Wednesday 7/5/06 – Maktesh Ramon, S’de Boker, Jerusalem – Day 10

We left Eilat after breakfast and Shortly after we took off, they put on the movie “Exodus.”  I thought – “this is not really a kids’ movie.”  Fortunately, my boys were not interested in watching.  After a couple of hours we arrived at the “crater” at Ramon - “Makhtesh Ramon.”  Dad said it wasn’t really a crater because it wasn’t created by either volcanic or meteoric action.  It was created when rock was pushed up to make a hill.  The hill was composed of a thin hard shell over a soft core.  The shell eroded at the top and then the core eroded, leaving a crater 24 miles long and 5 ½ miles wide.  Behind my parents in the picture on the left, you can get a good feel for how the hard shell made a lip and the soft core eroded away underneath it.  The picture on the right is a very cool and complicated sundial that was at the crater.

We ate lunch there.  Jonathan had hot dogs and Benjamin had schnitzel (“a really big chicken nugget.”)  Then off to our next stop, David Ben Gurion’s home in S’de Boker in the Negev.  It was interesting to hear about the problems of integrating an ex-prime minister into a Kibbutz.  The picture on the right is his living room.

The picture below left is his bedroom and the one below right is his library.

We set off once more for Jerusalem and watched the rest of the movie – Exodus is a long movie!  That night, we had dinner with Stuart and Marci and kids again.  We walked to a restaurant in the German quarter.  We went through “Liberty Park” which had a replica of the Liberty Bell.  When we walked in to the restaurant and said there was 15 people in our group, their jaws dropped, but they squeezed us in.  There were several issues with the service not being what we expected and some of us weren’t impressed by the food.  For example, I ordered a portabello mushroom burger, which turned out to be ground portabello mushroom, not the whole one I was expecting.  The restaurant knew that we weren’t happy and they gave us free vanilla ice cream (which also wasn’t very good.)  The meal took forever.  Afterwards Stuart and family took a cab and we walked back. 

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