The Laughlins

Believe it or not, I am going to try to complete our Yam L Yam (Sea to Sea) Backpacking Trip posts! Yippee! First, I will introduce our band of fearless hikers: Hayley (South African with the great accent - we make her perform African chants for us), Alana (you'll recognize Alana as our Egypt trip buddy - see Egypt photos), Amanda (South Carolina stud - leaving for the army this summer: she's the one with the great white turban thing going on), Ryan (our Hebrew-speaking male who served as translator and protector), and crazy Mark and Aubrey, of course.

We all met at the central bus station in Jerusalem in the early afternoon of Friday, April 20th. We wanted to make sure that we could catch buses all the way to Ackziv Beach before Shabbat started. We took a bus to Haifa, then transferred to another bus that took us to the main station in Haifa (short ride), and then took a bus to Naharriya, where we ate lunch together. Naharriya is a really cute "beach town" that Mark and I would like to visit again. After lunch, we transferred to our final bus, which dropped us off at Achziv beach somewhere around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.

Achziv was BEAUTIFUL! Wow! We ended up camping right next to a lagoon on the Mediterranean, and the water there was various shades of blue and green. It was a gorgeous day, and we spent many hours just enjoying our time on the beach. None of us wanted to go swimming - only because (practically-speaking), we were about to be showerless for three days and we didn't want to start by getting salt-covered and sticky the night before. Otherwise, I would have been the first to jump in! After we set up camp, we cooked food with the Laughlin Pocket Rocket (such a great backpacking asset) and went to bed so that we could get an early start.

Well, the night didn't go as nicely as the evening because all of the Israeli party animals showed up and camped on all sides of us, with vehicles on the beach blaring music into the wee hours of the morning. Apparently we were camped right where people liked to walk as well, because they loudly marched past our tents most of the night. We slept a little, and in the morning, we broke camp, pretended to throw rocks at all of their tents, and headed out :)

Remember that you can click on any picture to enlarge it!!