Too Much Sand...Not Enough Ocean...

Thus, my major assessment of the Middle East at this point...too much sand...not enough ocean:-)
Sand, sand...everywhere there's sand. Spending the last couple of days walking has made me come to appreciate and perhaps understand why it took 40 years of wandering around in this place! Walking on sand is tough and doing it in 85 degree weather and trying to keep a pace that 45 people can keep up with is even tougher. So, think about hauling babies, sick people and everything you own, along with...oh say...about 2 million of your closest friends, and you can see real fast how that would wear you down in a quick sort of way.
I, for some reason, cannot get my Petra blog entry to upload, so I'm not going to retype it all now - but I will try to post it at some point later on...but in the course of hiking up a mountain, a total of over 10 miles, in the sand, heat and ROCKS (lots of rocks)...more than once, I thought to myself, this is stupid...we should have stayed back at the bottom where it was comfortable. Sound familiar to anyone??? ('this hiking around out here in the middle of nowhere sucks! We should have stayed in Egypt! Let's stop this craziness and turn around and go back!!' --- AHV {Angel Hillman translation})
Anyhow - today we are staying at the Sea of Galilee and I'm anxious to see the sun rise, so I'm gonna stop for now. But, all is well, all are tired...and we're just getting started:-)
Love,
Angel