Adventures & Misadventures Abroad: The Sea of Galilee

Today we drove around a portion of the Sea of Galilee. The weather forecast of partly rainy, partly cloudy turned out to be all rain for the first part of the day. We left Nazareth and headed for Tiberias and the tourist center. My plan was to get lots of wonderful brochures with directions to all the sights from them. See some stuff here, have lunch before we went on. Alas, the tourist office was closed until 4pm. Who would start sightseeing at 4pm? That made no sense. The guide book did not give directions to the attractions around this area. So on we went. Our first views of the Sea of Galilee. Under very cloudy clouds.

This is the location where I took the above pictures. Our rental car is the one parked. I was trying to show the hills of the area. Every city/town is build on the side of a hill.

Since the tourist office in Tiberias was closed, we drove on and stopped just outside of Ginosar at the museum called Yigal Alon. This museum housed one thing - an ancient sea of Galilee fishing boat. Two brothers who lived in the area and were amateur archaeologists, found boat in the 1986 drought. As the sea dried up more things were exposed. The museum was the story of how they extracted this ancient boat without destroying it. It was very complicated and took 10 years to stabilize so that it could be put on display.

Our next stop was to be the church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. However, the parking lot was full - so we pushed on to Capernaum. It has been raining constantly so far today. Going between heavy and quite light. Luckily it is light here. I do have to mention tourist buses. It is surprising at how many people feel the need to be on a bus tour. Almost every other vehicle is a tourist bus or mini van. No matter what site you go to, you cannot escape them. Even at restaurants, you need to beat them, otherwise your meal will be delayed. Today we kept running into the yellow sash tour group.

It has been so easy to navigate around the places we have been in Israel. In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem we were in cities and used public transportation. We had no problem getting around, even with our daughter and young family. We felt very safe in those cities. Since then, we picked up a rental car and have been driving in northern Israel. Driving is very sedate. There is some honking - but you can ignore that. Mostly because traffic is not moving fast enough. Most of the time there is nothing you can do about it. Again, we feel very safe here.

Capernaum is all ruins of an ancient city.

View of the Sea of Galilee and area

After lunch we headed back to he Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes.

It is after 4pm and time to head home. The trip home was interesting. Wase sent us through all these tiny steep roads to try to avoid traffic. We explored areas that we were not expecting too. Now back home it is time to take pictures of the views from the apartment with sunlight!!