Holy Land Pilgrimage Day 9-10 and Epilogue, Saturday June 9-10, 2023

By Joe | Published: September 25, 2023

This is the final post for our Holy Land Pilgrimage. On Day 9 we drove to Tel Aviv with some interesting stops along the way. Day 10 was a travel day, with unexpected complications. And I’ll have some final words in an epilogue.

For reference purposes, here’s a list of all of the posts for our Holy Land pilgrimage:

Day 9:

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem is the 17th largest museum in the world, with 199,000 sq ft of area. We took quite a few pictures, but I only included a couple. For details see here. It houses many different collections, including archeology, contemporary works, fine art, and religious artifacts. The collection includes a Rembrandt painting of St. Peter in Prison, and works by Picasso and Rubens. We only spent 2 hours there, but you could spend days. There is a very large and detailed scale model of Jerusalem in 66 AD (before it was destroyed in 70 AD). The museum is noted for its extensive exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the Qumran caves from 1946 to 1956. If you’re not familiar, they contain writings of great historical and religious significance. The Great Isaiah Scroll is the oldest known complete copy of the Book of Isaiah from the Old Testament (from about 125 BC). Information about the Dead Sea Scrolls is here, and about the museum collection is here.

Our next stop was the St. Mary of the Resurrection Abbey in Abu Ghosh (see here), which is one of the four possible locations of the city of Emmaus in biblical times. After Jesus’ resurrection, two disciples were on the road to Emmaus when Jesus met up with them, but they didn’t recognize Him. He taught them on their journey (his words “burning in their hearts”), and they finally recognized Him during a meal (“He was made know to them in the breaking of the bread”). Kevin taught from Luke 24:13-35. This is an ‘A’ site.

Then we traveled to the Elah Valley, which is the site where the Israelites fought the Philistines, and David battled Goliath. The bus pulled off in what looked to me like an unmarked, ‘random’ spot on the highway. I marked the spot on my google maps, and found out later that it isn’t so random – this spot is also on the map as the site of the David and Goliath battle. We hiked in a short distance, to the location where the battle took place. Kevin taught from 1 Samuel 17:31-54 and 2 Samuel 21:15-17. Our guide, Ikey, demonstrated throwing a stone with a sling, the same type of weapon that David used to kill Goliath. Kevin said that the Holy Family traveled through this area on their flight to Egypt to escape Herod’s killing of the Holy Innocents. This is an ‘A’ site. We didn’t take any pictures at this stop.

Our last stop was in the Jaffa neighborhood of Tel Aviv. We walked to the restaurant where we had our ‘goodbye’ dinner. We had an interesting walk through Jaffa. We stopped at St. Peter’s Church, and got some photos there.

Day 10 – Travel day:

The original itinerary was that we would head to the airport after dinner for our midnight flight back to the U.S. Unfortunately, our flight was canceled. Kevin and the travel agency had to scramble, and were able to get most of us (except for a few who made their own plans) on a plane the next morning. We stayed the night at the Link Hotel in Tel Aviv. Fortunately, the airline reimbursed us for the hotel and the transportation costs. We left at noon the next day from Tel Aviv, and arrived in Newark, NJ at 4:55 PM. We left from Newark at 8:30 PM, and arrived in Phoenix at 10:48 PM. The total travel time was about 20 hours, and the in-flight time was about 17.5 hours. I was miserably sick, which made the day harder. But I had to grind through it, and I was happy that I got sick on the last day instead of the first!

Epilogue:

First, some thanks. Thanks to Kevin who organized the trip, and did wonderful teachings from the Bible at many of the sites. Our guide, Ikey, had encyclopedic knowledge of everything Israel. Yunus maneuvered our large bus like a magician in the most difficult locations. Thanks also to all of our travel companions. It was a great group, and such a privilege to get to know them. We had a professional photographer take a picture of our group. I took a photo of it (click on it for a larger picture):

It was a big project going through the pictures and creating these blog posts! I hate to think about how many hours Mary Ann and I spent. I don’t think it’s very interesting to many people, but at least it helped Mary Ann and me. We learned more about the trip than we knew when we were there!

We used our pictures and notes we took, along with some books and websites, to help us recreate the trip. The picture metadata has date and time and geolocation information. I put the pictures on google maps to help locate things. We took 892 photos, kept 555 of them (deleted 337), and published 360 on the blogs. Out of the ‘kept but not published’ photos (195 of them), 57 are of informational signs.

The pictures downloaded to the website have a reduced resolution. This means that if you zoom in on them, they will look more blurry than the original. But, for the size of the pictures on the website, the lower resolution is fine. I reduced the resolution of the pictures to reduce the storage requirements on the server, and also to make it quicker to load the pictures when you view them. If you want the higher resolution original of any picture, just let me know, and I’ll send it to you.

This wasn’t a photography trip, but if it was, Israel is a great birding spot. I did identify a few birds. One day Mary Ann and I went out with binoculars before breakfast to the Sea of Galilee. I identified the following birds: Hooded Crow; White-spectacled Bulbul; Common Myna; Spur-winged Lapwing; Gray Heron; Eurasian Blackbird. At Gethsemane I saw a Eurasian Hoopoe (the national bird of Israel). At Masada we saw a Tristram’s Starling.

This trip was an inspiring pilgrimage. Never again will we read the Bible in the same way – this trip has brought the Bible to life for us.

Finis!