Zikhron Ya'akov, Israel; our home for 12 days.
Other pages: Haifa , Jerusalem I, Jerusalem II, Tel-Aviv , Zikhron-2 , 
Dead Sea I ; The caves of Qumran: Dead Sea II; Masada and a swim:
 Galilee I: Nazareth, Cana, Tyberius, Ancient boat
Galilee II: Capernaum, Zfad, Haifa, Home.

Map of Israel

We would like you to join us in our fabulous holiday trip to Israel where we visited Ruth, Shel and their young children Jenelle and Dustan. We were there 12 days from December 23, 2000 until January 3.  Here are some pictures of their family in their small home in Zikhron Ya'akov, a small tourist town located about 25 kilometers south of Haifa. Ruth is here for the entire nine month school year while the children are enrolled in an Israeli public school. Sheldon is staying in Austin, Texas where he is working at IBM, but has been granted three one month trips to Haifa where he can work at their IBM plant there for three weeks each trip. Their apartment is small, compact, comfortable and heated with electric space heaters when the January weather gets too cold.

By  now, the map above may have downloaded and you can see the location of our Israel home-for-a-week at the top. Most of the other trips we made are identified and we will be referring to it from time to time. Perhaps it will stay in your cache.

Jenelle was very good at juggling her sticks, and Dustan played his keyboard sitting on an ironing board every day. The desk in the background held the Levenstein and Wunderlich computers.

We were there the whole week of Hanukah and joined them in

eating many meals and having occasional nip of duty-free.

Their Friday night Shabbat was especially enjoyable. Those pictures on the wall were printed by Shel and Ruth from their many digital photographs.

Ruth and Elaine both busy at their laptops. Sheldon made an ITT dialup connection on our computer so we could email and update our church website.

Their living room with portable heater

We did not stay with them but rented this nice cottage a short walk, and a longer but less time consuming drive from R&S.

Our nicely equipped kitchen area

our little reading corner

and our cozy sleeping nook made this a very comfortable stay.

We even had a nice porch surrounded by growing things.

We saw those red/yellow things in grocery stores and now realized that they were cactus fruit.     So much for Zikhron Ya'akov for the moment. We'll return to some more activities in this pleasant village. It seems to be a favorite touring town for Israelis and Sheldon is constantly being asked for directions whose answers really challenges his ability to speak Hebrew . NEXT: HAIFA and a DRUZE village.