Shnat

That day was today. We woke up early to leave the house at 830, very early considering on many days we don't get started until after noon. Oh, I had my first ever soft-boiled egg for breakfast! We left the house and walked all along the beach to Rosh Hanikra. It was beautiful, sunny and gorgeous outside, with a beautiful view of the beach and lots of amazing conversation. I was amazed with the rocks there, thinking about how the volcanic rock that made up the coast was once an ocean floor created by plates shifting what seems like an infinite amount of time ago... We saw a sculpture/monument that we couldn't find a description for but which seemed very clearly to be the carcass of a war ship dug up from the ocean. We saw so so many fishermen all standing on the rock out in water... I really don't know what the name is for this kind of thing, where the rock makes like a shelf out in the water, sometimes submerged and sometimes not... I don't know, but it was really amazing to see, to be able to walk on, to see the water passing over it.. And we stopped to eat at a spot where the waves hit this rock shelf in such a way that it made a loud clapping sound and water shot up high in the air, with lots of mist and little pools of beautiful, clear water made in the rock shelf. We also came by this little village-looking place, called Achsiv, which one girl told us was at one point a club med, and was a self-proclaimed independent nation created by a crazy man named Eli Avivi. Now it is just a private residence of some sort, and it was very interesting to look at as we walked along the coast, and the beach being private, we had to walk by the entrance to the place to continue onward up the coast. When we got to the entrance, people were there doing maintenance work and told us we could go in if we just wanted to walk around and look for a short while, so we went in and walked around for a bit. It was pretty neat. Interesting story there.

Walking along the beach for about 4 hours, talking and looking and enjoying the amazing place we live in was really an experience I am very happy to have had and especially so out of our own accord. I really saw many sights I have never seen similar things to before, spoke about very meaningful, personal topics with really wonderful people. The whole time, today and over the weekend, taking in these amazing experiences of a natural scene very new to me, it was very hard for me not to think of my family, of my parents and brothers who are usually my companions and leaders on any excursion into a new natural world, as well as my cousins, who I usually am with going on hikes in our beloved Adirondacks. I don't know, it just really made me think, for the billionth time, of how important those experiences with my family are to me and how much I want to continue to share those things with them.