Joe and Mary Ann's personal web site

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.

This is the second of two posts for our second day in the Old City of Jerusalem. We pick up from the last post, and after lunch we head to the Wailing Wall.

Today we went back into the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a busy day, with a lot of pictures, so I decided to break it into two posts: Part 1 and Part 2.

Today we headed south for a swim in the Dead Sea, with a couple of stops along the way.

This is the second of two posts for our day in the Old City of Jerusalem. We pick up from the last post at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

This was the day we went to the Old City of Jerusalem. We did a lot, so I decided to break it into two posts: Part 1, and Part 2.

Today is our wedding anniversary! It’s also the day we said goodbye to Galilee and our Magdala Hotel and headed to Jerusalem, with some stops along the way.

We started our day with Mass in the Duc in Altum Church at our hotel for the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Then we headed north to Tel Dan Nature Reserve in the Golan Heights. The Dan Stream, which is a headwater of the Jordan River, runs through here. This is the site of many events in the Old Testament. If you’re interested in more details, see here. Abraham’s Gate is the entrance to the ancient city, and is 4,000 years old. Kevin taught from Genesis 12:1-9. This is an ‘A’ site.

The third day of our trip to the Holy Land started in Nazareth, Jesus’ home town, at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation. This is one of several different churches of the annunciation in Nazareth. In Jesus’ time there was a spring there, and Mary’s Well is where the eastern orthodox believe that Mary was drawing water when she was visited by the angel Gabriel. The current site of Mary’s Well is a nonfunctioning re-creation that was dedicated in the year 2000. It’s a beautiful church, and I included quite a few pictures of the religious art displayed there. There is a ‘lower church’, which is below the ‘upper church’.

I changed my mind from what I wrote in the previous post, and decided to write about our Israel trip. It’s been a couple of months now, but it was such a memorable trip. Mary Ann and I keep talking about it, and trying to remember things, and going back to the photos to refresh our memories. We did so much and went to so many places that it was overwhelming to keep track of them all. So, we decided that since we had all the cell phone photos, we would like to use them to document our trip, to help retain our memory of it. It wasn’t a photography trip, so the photos in the post are cell phone photos, quickly snapped, just to record the event or place.