A trip to the Golan

Today, one of my classes was canceled at the last minute. This is a "late cancellation", so I will still get paid. Anyway, this gave us some free time in the middle of the day, and it was a beautiful sunny day (after being rainy all day yesterday!). So, we decided to take a drive.

After crossing the Jordan River, we continued up into the Golan nearly all the way to Syria. Then we turned south on the main road that runs along the eastern side of the Golan. After a while, we came near a round mountain that we can see straight east from our house.

For some reason, the pictures are in the reverse order from what I intended. In the last picture, you can see a view of the mountain from our house (taken using the maximum zoom on my camera). In the next-to-last picture, you can see the mountain from up close.

Although there is a military on the top of the mountain, one can actually drive almost all the way to the top before getting to the entrance gate. In fact, before that, we drove around a crater, which is not so surprising since these peaks on the Golan are all volcanic. In the 3rd picture, you can see a view across the crater. On the other side is the gap through which we came on the road. Far in the distance, you can see Har Meron, the highest point in pre-1967 Israel, which is west of Tsfat.

I took the 2nd picture from the west side of the round mountain looking west towards Tsfat. It's actually rather hard to identify Tsfat, because Har Meron is taller and is directly behind Tsfat in this view.

After returning to the main road, we continued south. Eventually, we took a road to the west and down to the Kinneret (the so-called "Sea of Galilee"). On the way, we stopped at a little rest area where we stretched our legs a little and I took some more pictures. The first picture is one that I took from here. Tsfat is in the upper middle of this picture, Har Meron is on the left, and you can see a little bit of the Kinneret in the lower left. Isn't this a pretty view?