sunrise over Sea of Galilee

Well now that I have finished all my midterms and they have all been turned in, I have officially crossed the halfway mark.  I only have 7 regular weeks left in the semester, then finals week, and then a week long trip to Egypt! That is still class time, but it'll be awesome.  So time is moving very quickly as expected.  So of course the big question of whats next is still something I think about too much.  But something that I may have already said and that i keep reminding myself is that I need to focus much more on today and what I am doing now, and that is exploring Israel.  This past weekend was free for us. Usually we have a field study going on, but this past weekend the whole thing was free for us.  I made it more free my skipping my History of Jews class which is on Fridays 1:00-3:30pm. So my two friends, Joe and Josh, and myself went up to the Galilee and hiked a trail known here as the "Jesus Trail"  Its about a 40 mile walk from Nazareth to Capernaum.  The main purpose of the walk, for us, was to seek God in a new and different way so we decided to fast during the journey.  We ate our last meal, lunch on Friday, left Jerusalem in the afternoon and didn't end up getting to Nazareth until about 6:00pm cuz of some travel difficulty.  When we got off the bus we had no idea where we were.  Well, we knew we were in Nazareth. lol.  We had a compass and a like, free map that was for tourists and business ads. (not that helpful) So, with actually little trouble, we found the trail and started our journey.  The sun had already set by now so we walked just far enough to get out of the city and pitch our tent out in the hill country.  Saturday was the hunk of our trip.  We walked for about 13 hours.  After we packed up our stuff and got back on the trail, we made a wrong turn like 30 feet after we started walking, which we ended up doing a lot through the trip. But we were very able to make our own trail.
We ended up walking along side a major highway for a while to bypass some of the actual trail.  We came to a big intersection and across the street from us was a McDonalds! haha.  We wanted to stop, give up, and eat.  So we sat a bus pick-up spot and debated what we were going to do.  Ended up sleeping/debating there for like an hour.  We finally got the strength to continue without eating.
The rest of the day after that was difficult in plenty of ways.
We wanted to hike through the night and get to capernaum so that in the morning we could eat.  We decided that while we were sitting down in a valley as the sun was setting.  We picked up and started walking again.  Now the sun had set again and we were came to a mountain we had to climb to get out of the wadi.  Just as we started we heard howling, coyotes i guess.  Whatever it was it was kind of scary, but at the same time really hilarious.  It took us like 20 minutes to get out of the wadi and then we decided we couldn't go any longer. lol. this was about an hour after we had decided to finish the trip in the night!
Well Sunday was crazy, but we got to Capernaum and sadly our trip was far from over. There was nothing there. No food and no public transportation. We walked along side the road with our thumbs out hoping to get picked up.  That didnt work. lol. We made it to another bus pick-up place along the road and waited there. Luckily a taxi passed by, so we got a ride to the nearest big city. Again - we still had a lot to do to get back home, to Jerusalem. But. it was fun.

camping in a fertile valley

on the trail

almost there

So that was an awesome trip in many ways.  Its Tuesday now aand I'm just wasting time.  THere are still plenty of things I haven't seen or done yet.  So I'm planning to get some work done and then make some time for more site seeing.  We have another big field study this weekend.  Its actually in the Galilee so i'll be going back there and probably seeing a few things for the second time. 
I got a 90 on my Egypt  midterm.  That  was good.  We only have 3 grades for that class. So i'm doing fairly well. lol. uhhhhhhhh.  I guess thats all for now.
I still don't REALLY know what I'm doing next semester. I thought I knew. But I don't.  No matter what, If you're reading this I will and cannot wait to see you in January.
Bye