Lehitraot

We traveled the width and breadth of the Holy Land for a month, but there simply wasn't enough time (and sometime money!) to do absolutely everything on my list. Some of the time skipping an activity or site was due to Israel's minor obsession with needing reservations. A smaller portion of the adventures that awaited us were do to random age requirements. I am going to list all of the things that crossed my mind, my message boards or my path that we will just have to put off for next time (when ever that may be!). I can't vouch for any of these things, but they are worth looking into.

In NO particular order:
Qatsrin: Ancient Talmudic ruins in the north. General info on Katzrin and the area
Beit She'an: More ruins, fairly to the north, but they have a light and sound interactive hologram show set amongst the stones that is supposed to be very well done The parks website
Sachne National Park and Hot Springs: Constant 83 degree water with waterfalls, very near Beit She'an and right next door to Gan Garoo. We should have gone, but the thought of changing everyone and then back again was just to overwhelming for us to deal with at that time. Might make a great winter activity.... It is also called Gan HaShlosha
Rosh HaNikra Grottos: I really wanted to go, it was just too far north and closed too early for us to squeeze it in. http://www.rosh-hanikra.com/default.asp?lan=eng
Tiberias: In the summer it is like a steam oven, but I would like to go back to the Kineret, walk around and go to Rambam's burial site. If I could have come up with one other great reason to go to Tiberias on this past trip I would have, but my kids were getting burnt out on graves.
Holon Children's Museum: Particularly the "Dialogue in the Dark". You need to reserve, and there is an age restriction of 8 years old and above. It does have other parts to the museum for younger kids if you need to split up, but as far as I can tell you still need to reserve and go around with some sort of a guide. I could be wrong, but that is why we skipped it. http://www.childrensmuseum.org.il/front/ShowCategory.aspx?CatID=99
Tnuva Factory Tour: They have two factories that offer tours, one in Rechovot and one in Tavor. They both have a minimum age of 6, but are supposed to be interesting, and entertaining and fairly inexpensive. With my son Mendel who has an anaphylactic allergy to all things dairy we simply could not go there. What was I supposed to do, cover him in saran wrap? Keep jabbing him with the epi-pen and tossing Benadryl into his mouth? Oh, and FYI tours are ONLY in Hebrew, by advanced reservation and very select days. You also need to tell them if you keep mehadrin kosher.The Tnuva Website is all in Hebrew...
Bamba Tour: Yes, we like factory tours. This one we had planned to do. We called in May to book July and were told to call again in June. My sister called June 6th and was told the ENTIRE July was full. And yes, Mendel is allergic to Dairy but not to peanuts (TG!)http://www.osem.co.il/en/home/The-Bamba-House–Visitor-Center
Afrikef: At some point during our stay I had planned on going to see the monkeys, but I was misinformed that it was farther than Be'er Sheva (pretty far south, and hotter as you go) so I nixed the plan. Sadly, I later found out that it is rather close to where I was staying. What's the point of the place, not much, but there is an enclosure of free roaming monkeys. Admission is on the high side for random attractions, but next time I think we will Go see the monkeys !
Safari Park: This is near Tel Aviv. You drive into the Safari Park with your own car and drive around the animals, even lions. You stop and some of them come up to your car, keep your windows closed. That would have been great. Again, awesome, a bit pricey for what it is, and just not enough time for such a random activity. We had already dinged up our rental car and should have just gone for it. http://www.safari.co.il/content.php?id=3

Please let me know if you check any of these out for your self and if they are worth while to do on a future trip. If you have any other must do outings that I didn't get to, I would love to hear about it. Leave a comment!
Erica

It will take a tank to get us home.

The major draw back of renting a home in a less touristy city is you have to clean it up before you leave. No maid service, no cleaning crews. Pity.
Our last day in Israel therefore consisted of packing and cleaning up the house. It has four floors, but right away I figured out that we didn't need the attic level so I closed it off. One of my more brilliant thoughts, as now I didn't have to clean the bedroom or more importantly the bathroom up there.
Israel is a fairly dusty country. From the start of our trip we made everyone remove their shoes at the entry in order to lessen the dust brought into the house. Daily sweeping and weekly sponja-ing (Israel's version of mopping and sending everything down a drain hole in your floor) was needed, but now I meant business. Level by level I herded the kids to areas of the house and declaring bathrooms off limits. It was starting to look good, but there would still be a lot of last minute cleaning.
Once most of the jobs were accomplished, I still needed to get the kids out. We went into the Mercaz (city center) of RBS-A and picked up tzitzis for Dovie -- kind of like a restaurant version, you pick the size and style of the garment and then the thickness and knot style of the strings. Dovie chose a larger sized, wool, Chabad type garment. We were given the choice of thicker or thinner strings. Since I had NO idea which way to go, we chose one of each and left with two freshly tied pairs of tzitzis. We then headed to the candy store for some re-enforcements for the flight home. The kids had their final round of Angry Bird Popsicles. And then, to the underground shekel store!
I had been promising the kids "real" souvenirs. They seemed to all want IDF type of items. I also needed to get the kids out of the house so it would stay clean. And, I wanted them on the more tired side of the line for the trip home. That calls for one last outing. Latrun Tank Museum fit the bill.

http://www.yadlashiryon.com  Latrun was actually home to a British Police station that was the site of a battle. You can see the shell pock marks in the walls. It is on the road to Yerushalaim and overlooks a large critical area.  When we got there, they were setting up for a swearing in of a new Tank Brigade, so there weren't any tour guides.

 We entered the site for 100NIS a family and handed a self guided map. We fortunately brought my nephew Shlomo with us who ate a tour guide for lunch and knew everything there was to know about the area and the various tanks.

The kids listened to him for a while, but really they just wanted to climb on the tanks and pretend to attack the enemy. There is an indoor component, but due to the event that was to take place shortly, they moved things around and roped other exhibits off. We never did locate the movie and spent very little time inside. Most of the action was outdoors anyway. There are several tanks that can be climbed on, tank carriers you can cross, even tanks that are cut in half so you can see how the soldiers man them and how the engines look.

There were scores of soldiers hanging around awaiting for the ceremony to begin, so of course I couldn't let that photo op go by. Randomly, I approached a soldier and asked him, in Hebrew, if we could take a picture with his buddies with the kids. He answered me back in English. He wanted to know where we are from. I told him California. He asked where in California. I told him just outside of LA. He said, Oh, his best friend is from the San Fernando Valley. I said, well, we are from the SFV, in Tarzana. So, he asked me if we know a certain family.... We did! They daven at our shul and we know them well.  Small world. We then got our final IDF picture!
We stopped off at the Latrun gift shop and the big boys got bullet necklaces. Meir got an "I love the IDF" giant pen and I bought Bailey a stuffed camel. One thing she learned on the trip is the noise a camel makes. Ask her next time, it is very funny.
The Berman's had a family Bar Mitzvah to go to, so we went to their house for our final farewells. Then, in keeping with my mission of making sure the house stays clean I took the kids to eat dinner at the burger store in the mercaz.

 We returned back to the house to finish up packing and cleaning the house. Thank G-d my niece Elisheva came along to help me out. She was like a fairy with spare hands. She changed Bailey, sorted the foods and items her family would keep from our surplus, sponja'd the kitchen floor and helped pack up some odds and ends. Since our rental car had enough space for my family to sit in, a stroller and a sandwich, we needed to have a cab help take half of the kids and half of the suit cases.

We returned the rental car (filed the damage report....), and got to the airport in good time only to stand in line after line. We boarded the plane and took off a little after 1 AM back to LAX. I can hardly believe this long anticipated trip has come to an end. But here we are.

Got a Coke and a smile.

My kids love watching "Unwrapped" and learning how their favorite (and sometimes foods unknown to them) are made and sent to market. So, when we found out that Coca Cola in Bnei Brak offers tours, we signed right up. Yes, of course, this is yet another activity you need to plan for well in advance. If you have a group of 15 or more they will even set up something in English for you. We were 12 counting the little kids, so Hebrew it is. http://www.cocacola.co.il/Center/home.html 

Yerushalaim cities are challenging at best for parking, but Bnei Brak takes the cake. The streets are incredibly narrow and mostly 2 way. There are no meters or pay areas that I could determine. After about 15 minutes of snaking my way through I decided to park like and Israeli and invent a space on a sidewalk next to an apartment building. I made sure that anyone near there could get out and I wasn't blocking any driveways. I just couldn't wait to get out of my car already.

The kids and my sister went a head as scheduled, but the Coca Cola tour guides later brought me up to meet them. They have a strict 8 years old and up policy for the tour, so I had to bring Bailey, Meir and Chana to the Coke tasting area to hang out with my sister while I continued with the rest of the kids. I had missed the group shot picture in front of a backdrop of Coke cans from around the world, a movie (because that is how all Israeli tours begin) and room set up like an old fashioned bar where Coca Cola began. I thankfully missed some sort of spinny room that was supposed to evoke your senses. When I caught up with them, all of the kids were on exercises bikes pedaling to music through a forest. I think it was to show you how Coke gives you energy.
 Our next stop was onto a ride that was shaped like giant bubbles. The ride moved up and down while we put on 3-D glasses and went through a Coke-world that was mostly a tour of old Coke ads (many I remembered....) Finally we were admitted into the Coke factory. We watched zillions of 1.5L bottles line up, fill up, get their labels and lids and be boxed and stacked. It was pretty cool, and very loud. Rav Landau who gives Coke products their hechsher is one of only 3 people in the world who know the whole Coke recipe.

Our final stop met up with the little kids. Every one could take a bottle of soda of choice (of course some kids asked for a Pepsi :P ).

The day was still young and thee was now sugar and caffeine in abundance to burn off, so off to the park. My brother-in-law works in nearby Petach Tikva (or according to local signage Tikwa) therefore the Berman's knew of a great park that was across from a mall. I don't know if the park has a name, but it is on Basel street. This park has one of the largest, most complex climbing structures I have ever seen. It also had an enormous rope swing that all of the kids could stand and swing on at one time. The kids ran, climbed, slid and spun for a while.

 We ate lunch and then ventured across the street into the well air conditioned mall for an ice cream treat. Burger Ranch has a special, 4 soft serve ice cream cones for 10NIS (about $2.50). We walked the mall a bit before heading back home.

The the little kids topped off their day with a swim in the Berman's pool. They dined on Pizza Hut while RC and I ate dinner out sans kids.