The Laughlins

This is an interview with Hayley Wilton about the adventures of the last day of our hike. Enjoy!!

DRUZE SHEPHERD WITH GOATS:


A FLOCK OF STORKS IN NAHAL AMUD:

Just a quick note to remind you to check the actual "story" plus additional pictures that I added to the "Yam L Yam Day 2"
Yam L Yam: Day 2 Update!!

We continued our descent by way of a black 4x4 road (black being like a black diamond on a ski slope). I took a picture of SpongeBob, I mean Mark, on the way down. Mark earned the name SpongeBob on the first day because if you were behind him, it was impossible to see his head - only his arms and legs and a square pack. We had fun giving him a hard time the whole time :)





We paused for 30 minutes for lunch, nursing our blisters and sore feet, as we were not planning on stopping anymore (and hadn't thus far) except for 5 minutes here and there. As we crested our next hill, we got our first glipse of the Sea of Galilee. From here we took a moment to look back at where we had come from. We continued down a hill, crossed a highway, and went to the ridge of the next mountain. Even as we were hiking, I was thinking this is a LOT of elevation to get down in a short distance (and a short amount of time) - I had no idea how true that was!!




Our final descent was very STEEP!! We ended up going back and forth down switchback after switchback, using tree branches, bushes, etc. to keep us on our feet on the way down. It took a long time to get to the bottom, and then when we reached the bottom, we had to climb partway up the hill on the other side of the creek bed. The trail then followed the curve of the mountains, so that you were walking on the edge about halfway up the mountain face.









Mark and I switched off carrying an extra backpack during this stretch so that we could all make it off the mountain in one piece. Partway through this stretch (Nahal Amud), we were in two groups of three people - one group abouut 30 minutes ahead of the other. As the hills leveled out into a flatter, wider creekbed, we found ourselves walking through the prickly bushes...every thistle you can think of hugged you onto a narrow one-person wide path, and you were still scratching by all of them. I reached out my hand to steady myself on a tree around a corner, and immediately felt these incredible pains in my hand that shot my blood pressure way up! I had been stung by over 20 stinging nettles, and my hand immediately swelled up. The intense pain continued for another 15 minutes, then began to subside, and the swelling went down in an hour when we caught up with the other half of our group.

At this point, it was evening, the sun was beginning to set, and we knew that it would definitely be dark before we got to our destination. However, there weren't any places that we could have camped either, so it was either cut our trip short when we were so close, or push through the next stretch of the riverbed until we came to another highway. We started through the next section, but the thistles were totally closed in around the trail and taller than we were. We were getting all scratched up and met two guys partway through heading the other way. They said that it was thistles all the way through and that there was no way we'd make it before the sun went down. We stopped in the middle of the trail, put long pants and sleeves on, and went as fast as our insanely sore feet could carry us - pausing only to take a picture of a flock of storks that was watching us.





Then it happened - Ryan, in the lead, came back towards the rest of us and said that he had heard big crashes through the bushes in front of us and a deep growl of a mountain lion. Oh great! I was thinking the whole time earlier in the day, "It's a good thing that there are no mountian lions in Israel, because if there were, this would be where they would live." I was wrong - there are mountain lions in Israel.

We had no choice but to keep going at this point - you couldn't even move off of the trail with all the thistles, so we all clapped and made noise and stuck together and kept going. Soon we had to pull out flashlights and headlamps because it was too dark to see, our feet were killing us, and we were moving so quickly through a riverbed of rock now, which is hard to hike through. We kept telling each other not to twist an ankle or we'd be in big trouble. I saw many glowing eyes along the way, a snake, a dead cow carcass, and other foreboding cliffs ahead. Not only that, but trying to keep to a not-very-well-marked Israeli trail through a wide river bed now, at night, with flashlights, isn't the easiest thing to do either.

Mark finally spotted headlights ahead, and we made it to the highway. We all collapsed and laid in the dirt and gravel on the side of the road. We were exhausted and the bones in our feet felt like they had worn through the bottoms of our shoes. Mark and I were the only ones with any water, and it was only a gulp or two, and what little food was left was quickly divided between us. We stayed there for at least 20 minutes, and then decided to walk along the highway (no more mountain lions and riverbeds for us!). It was another 3-4 kilometers along the highway before we reached a gas station by the shore of the Sea of Galilee. What relief!! A sign of life...and food...and drink! We dropped all our stuff outside and bought water, chocolate milk, food, everything and ate like ravenous wolves. Hayley and I stayed with all of the gear, while the other four made their way to the shore of the lake to dump our Mediterranean Sea water into the Sea of Galilee.



By the time they got back, it was past 11pm, there were no buses, and there was no where we could go for the night, so we camped in a wheat field behind the gas station. The next morning, we caught a taxi into Tiberias, and caught the first bus to Jerusalem that we could.










What a trip!! What fun and crazy adventures! That will be a great life-long memory, fellow trekers! I'm so glad that we could do it together!

Many videos to come from this leg of the trip...check back soon!!!

We had no idea what a crazy day we would be in for on Day 3! We had covered a little over 40 of our eventual 70-kilometer-hike, and we were going to push to make it by the end of Day 3. Day 3 was Independence Day in Israel, which meant that the buses from Tiberias (Galilee) to Jerusalem stopped a little after 8pm...and we all wanted to get home earlier rather than later.

Mark was able to briefly talk with the Israeli backpacker about the upcoming trail for the day. The guy had a Hebrew book on the Israel trail and much of our hike was going to be along this trail. He warned us that there was an extremely steep ascent/descent on part of the trail that we might want to avoid, so we found an alternate trail that would cut this section out and make our trip a little shorter as well...or so we thought. The problem with topographical maps is that even though they might be fairly detailed, sometimes the ratio is still not detailed enough to see exactly what kind of ascents/descents you are going to run into!

We started up Mt. Meron for the first couple of hours, reaching the first observation point about an hour into our hike. We took pictures and were feeling pretty good overall that morning.









We continued up the mountain, arriving at various other lookout points, passing an army base, and eventually began our descent down the other side of the mountain. We briefly stopped in a parking lot for water, and then continued along our "alternate route" down, down, down...










The mountains began to give way to countryside, and we found ourselves in little agrarian areas with small vineyards, orchards, and other cultivated pieces of land. We even found an amusing "lazy boy" chair sitting in a field in the middle of nowhere! The most interesting part of this section of our trip was the Druze shepherd who came along the road we were walking on with his big herd of goats. The goats themselves were being quite amusing...as many goats can be, and we said "Good morning" to the shepherd and let the goats pass.












I am going to split this into two posts, so check back soon for Part 2 of our Day 3 adventures...it's all downhill from here!!

For my girls...listen to this song
Switchfoot: Let Your Love Be Strong.mp3

I still have a lot to catch up on, but I wanted to add these fun videos of our recent visit to the Temple Mount. Amanda, Audra, and Alana...I miss you girls very much. Thanks for the beautiful memories.

Homestar Runner Visits the Temple Mount


Interview with Amanda Staly and Mark Laughlin of CNN


Amanda and Aubrey Crocodile Hunters at the Temple Mount

OK - so here is the run-down of Day 2. As you can see, I did not take as many pictures of Day 2 (so I have added some of Amanda's pictures too) because it was probably the biggest "downer" of our time in the sense that we had to hike on a hot highway for a lot of the day and were in "civilization" too much instead of on a trail. Not only that, but I definitely got heat exhausted (despite drinking lots of water), and ended up with a terrible headache by late afternoon...but to backtrack...

We left between 8-9am in the morning. When we packed up camp, we noticed that Ryan had fashioned his knife/bamboo spear during the night to ward off predators since we put him in the "food" tent as bait...he he. He didn't have to use it though :) We first walked though Ein Tamir (Tamir Spring) near our camp and took pictures of the pools of water there (the first 5 pictures are Amanda's: the first two are where we actually camped on the first night, and the last three are at Ein Tamir).







Aubrey's Pix:





Our trail wound through a valley or sorts with the creek next to us for a few miles (kilometers) and then we hit a paved "fire road" of sorts that made a steep ascent up the hills. We hiked on this road for quite a while (and everyone was out of water besides Mark and me...and we were rationing by then). When we reached the top of the hill, we came upon this cookie-cutter neighborhood, that was totally void of people anywhere, and a loud speaker was booming through the whole neighborhood giving announcements in Hebrew. It was rather eerie - like somehthing out of "A Wrinkle in Time" or "Z for Zachariah"...or one of those sci-fi types of novels. Needless to say, we continued on to real civilization so that we could buy more water and food.







After asking directions in town (Ma'alot) and walking a few miles, we reached a giant Supersal (chain grocery store). It would have been the moment in some cheesy moment where the traveling, tired caravan spots the beautiful castle in the woods, and you hear angelic voices saying, "Awwwwwwww..." Yeah, a little over-dramatic, but we were hungry and thirsty.



We all stocked up, re-packed our backpacks, ate lunch, and had to continue hiking on the road through town (still uphill). When we reached the top of the hill, we walked down a number of sidestreets and staircases through neighborhoods until we reached the bottom of the hill, and we then had to walk along a (black asphalt) main highway up another loooonnnng, hot hill. We stopped at the top under some trees for a break and snack and then continued along the highway down the hill and up another one for another many miles until we reached the Druze town of Hurfish.







By the time we reached Hurfish, it was a few short hours before sunset, and I had a terrible headache and was heat exhausted. We all bought icecream, drank water, and walked to the far side of town (Amanda's pictures below).







FINALLY, we got off the main road and onto a dirt road that led back to our trail. We had to run through a field of little flies that were really thick so you had to squint and keep running and swatting the air in front of you - that was fun. Then we got into a canopy area of extremely thick underbrush where you couldn't move anywhere to the left or the right - and it would have been impossible to get through without a trail. By this time, the sun was setting, so it was extra dark for us, and we were trying to quickly make it through the underbrush to the base of Mt. Meron for the night. We covered a huge amount of distance (very quickly) in the last two hours of our hike that day. When we came out of the brush and climbed a hill, we found ourselves next to an Army base at the foot of Mt. Meron. We had to turn on our flashlights by this time to set up camp and collect firewood. We were greeted by more of our curious lynx creatures shortly thereafter and made dinner. During dinner, two other backpackers approached our camp (totally dark by this time) and ended up hanging out with us. One of them was Israeli and one of them from the U.S., and they were hiking the Israel Trail (goes from the top of Israel to the bottom) together. We chatted with them, sat around the fire for a little while, and then went to bed. What a long day...but if only I knew what a long day we were in for on Day 3!!!