Israel

I just got back from an amazing trip to Israel. We had some equipment being built near Haifa, and I was given the opportunity to go do the inspection. It was really and truly a gift from God, and while it was an incredible experience, it's also incredibly difficult to describe what it felt like...so I'm not really going to try here. I'd be glad to go into it all in person or on the phone or something.

So I got there on Sunday afternoon and headed straight to Jerusalem, where I stayed for three days. My hotel was on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus did a lot of His teaching. My room looked out to the courtyard of the chapel built where He ascended into Heaven.

I took the first three days to do some sightseeing, and the company I was visiting even arranged for a private tour guide - very cool. I spent the first day just going around Jerusalem - there's probably more history packed into the Old City than in the whole of America. The second day, we went out to the Dead Sea region and saw the Dead Sea, the caves at Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and Mosada, the cliff-fortress-city that was the last stand in the Jewish Wars against Rome. The third day, we headed back out the Dead Sea and drove up the side of the Jordan River to the Sea of Galilee. We saw among other things the place where John the Baptist baptized Jesus, the various villages where Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John came from, the town of Capernaum which Jesus used as a hub for His Galilean ministry, and the site where He fed the 5000.

Then it was off to Haifa (a city on the slope of Mount Carmel, where Elijah took on the prophets of Ba'al) and to real work. There, I spent two days in spirited negotiations making sure everything we designed and paid for was built correctly. The second evening, I took the train back to Tel Aviv and stayed on the Mediterranean coast, then caught a plane back to Houston the next morning.

It was an awesome trip, and one I'll never forget. Pictures are up on our picture site, which you can access from the link at the top. They'll say way more than I could ever write here.

Sander