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Dead Sea and Masada

It all started at 2am on the morning of Sunday the seventh day of our trip.  We awoke jumped in the Rental car with our bathing suits and some walking shoes.  As we were leaving Jerusalem for the Dead Sea my mother took a wrong turn but we were on a major highway that was deserted, so I piped up from the backseat to just back up and take the exit but she didn't get this message for another 300m when she started to slow.  As she put the car in reverse and had the car going about 25mph in reverse we say blue lights coming from behind coming quick.  So mom brought the rental Ford to a stop and a soldier jumped out of the Humvee and we said very innocently that we were trying to get to the Dead Sea and we got an armed escort out of town.  About five minutes later we roll through a check point and then another to get into the West Bank.  Israel has their checkpoints of lock-down and the way that they are so effective is they just racially profile each person.  If you look Israeli, or Western then you roll on through, but if you look Arab you get stopped and your car searched, it can take hours.  This is just one of the discriminatory practices of the Israeli people towards their Palestinian neighbors.

Back to the Story, so we drove two hours down to Masada in order to catch the sunrise over the Dead Sea.  We arrived at 5:45 and saw the amazing sunrise at 6am.  I hope to be able to include some pictures but they are great but almost instantly the temperature started climbing from a cool 70F.  We were warned that at Masada from 10am to 4pm temperatures of 45-50C, that is 112-122F.  Therefore we made sure that we got out of Dodge before the heat came.

After the sunrise we drove another hour back up 90 towards Jerusalem and stopped at a beach along the way.  It seams that they have these beaches all up and down the coast, P.S, private beaches get on my nerves.  When we got in the water the temp was near 100 but the water felt great.  I had heard about how you can float in the Dead Sea but I didn't know that you couldn't sink in the Dead Sea.  My father and I went out until we couldn't touch and you literally could not sink.  It was the coolest and weirdest feeling I have ever felt.

The mud of the banks is also very interesting, when we got there we were accompanied by about 10 other people and they were smearing this smooth black mud all over themselves.  We started to try out the methods and amazingly it felt great.  I used the mud as sunscreen because the prices were outrageously expensive and once you washed the mud off your skin was left smooth as a babies bottom.  One downside to the mud and the amazing salt water is that any exposed wounds hurt a lot.  Therefore I spend at good hour in the water and then had to get out because of the intense burning from some raw skin.  Then I proceeded to sleep in the shade until we returned to Jerusalem that night.

This is just one experience from our amazing trip to Israel.

All is Great in the Lord

Paul Shackelford

More Photos from our entire trip: https://plus.google.com/photos/102484709808402381964/albums/5664263551425737985
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Location: 63-77 Windmill Rd, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX3 7, UK

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