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.