The Jordan River

Happy New Year! I hope you are all blessed with health and happiness and lots of love in 2012. Thanks to the followers who entered my Christmas Week contest. You all win! YAY!

This is our last stop in Galilee--the Jordan River. There are two sites that claim to be the place where John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the Jordan River. It's all speculation and no one really knows. Our guide said he was probably baptized at the site closer to Jerusalem--where the Jordan River empties into the Dead Sea. We got there after dark, so couldn't see a lot. I just wanted to touch the water!

There's an area cordoned off so people can get in and be baptized. They rent white clothes at the huge gift shop. Yes, those heads are people in the water.

There was some kind of creature--muskrat or something like it--swimming in the river. You can't  quite make it out.

This is the view upriver. I prefer this shot because it feels less commercialized and more authentic. John and Jesus could step out of the trees and right into the water.

On our way out, look what we found. A tree planted at the site by Glenn Beck on his trip to Israel last summer. Had to chuckle at that!

After a thorough search of the gift shop that yielded a very cute camel dress-up hat for my Nativity dress-up collection, we hopped on our bus and drove through the night two hours to Jerusalem. We ate a quick dinner and then the bus took us to an amazing olive wood shop. But we left our cameras at the hotel, so I don't have pictures of it. We bought a beautiful nativity carved of olive wood. The owner, an Islamic Arab, told us the shop where it was carved is in Bethlehem. Bethlehem is in the Palestinian controlled area, so to go there you have to plan to spend a few hours going through the checkpoint. We only had two days in Israel, so we couldn't go to the Savior's birthplace, so it was lovely to bring home a piece of it with us. 

Yes, we did all of this in one day. Our heads were spinning. We spent the next day in Jerusalem. Watch for that in upcoming posts.