a hiking trip

Although I was very nervous getting behind the wheel—I had never driven a rental car, never driven outside of the US, didn’t know where I was going, and hadn’t driven at all in a few months—but I maneuvered out of the parking lot sans accident, so so far, so good. Chelsea sat in the front as navigator, which made her motion sickness better, but she doesn’t read any Hebrew, so this would be funny. Actually, she did a great job—and Israel is pretty good about making all signs trilingual (Hebrew, Arabic and English). That, and it a pretty easy route we were taking, just driving north to the Kinerret, and then following around the lake from one high way to another and then straight on to Katzrin and the Yehudiya reserve. Having the car was a very nice luxury, allowing us to just throw all of our things into the trunk and backseat, and not need to carry, or hold or worry about what is where.
Since daylight is a scarce thing, we thought it would be best to head to the reserve first to get some hiking done. We found the place well, packed up the back pack with our lunch food, and head out with our map. It may not have been raining anymore, but the evidence of the rain the previous day was certainly there. The woman at the desk had told us, had even warned us, but we were sure that mud wouldn’t stop us. Well, I guess technically it didn’t, but it did slow us down a bit. It was a very special kind of clay-like mud infused with cow excrement that would build up upon itself on our shoes, resulting in three inch platforms that needed to be regularly kicked off. It felt like walking on moon shoes.
Looking at our trail map, we had decided to head to the spring pools—even though it was very cold and rather muddy, we decided we would take a swim. It would likely be a very short swim, but since there would be no one else around, we would be able to lay in the sun and dry up afterwards while we ate our lunches. Except we never managed to find the pools. We were where they ought to have been, but all we saw was a small stream. And a crab (did you know there were freshwater crabs that hang out outside of the water? Did you know there were crabs in Israel? Not kosher…) So instead of the pools, we just hung by the stream, Hayley drank some brine, and we all enjoyed the weather and the beautiful scenery of the Golan. Since the reserve would be closing at 4 (the sun sets then) after lunch we turned back, traipsing back through the mud and swampyness (on the way in, I had fallen in a bit of swamp. Wet.). When we finally arrived back at the car, the level of mud and much on our shoes was beyond what we had expected possible. Chelsea and I luckily had another pair of shoes in the car. Hayley was not so fortunate. Needless to say, none of the muddy sneakers were worn into Siva—they were all quickly abandoned into bags (and at the time, I thought maybe forever; although I have since managed to clean them of almost entirely and have been wearing them again).