As I was leaving the women's kollel in Chevron on Thursday, I did some math and realized that if I was going to make it to Kof Amnon (a beach on the Kineret) by sundown I was going to have to get on a bus to Yerushalayim asap, a bus which had just passed by the stop in Chevron. As it turned out, about 5 minutes out of Chevron in Kiryat Arba we saw the bus to Yerushalayim. We jumped out of the car and raced after the bus. I figured that if I was going to get anywhere up North I would have to start my journey now (3pm) and if all my plans fell apart I'd figure something out.
So I started making phone calls. I had called a friend I was supposed to go camping with while walking through the Arab quarter in Chevron (don't ask) who said the plans fell through but I could call these two people who might want to go camping. I called and both were going to weddings, but one offered to lend me a sleeping bag (logistics would have been impossible). So I called another friend with whom I had agreed to go camping with originally and said "do you want to go camping tonight?" She said she'd work it out and call me back later.
I get on a bus to Tiveria from the Jerusalem central bus station and call Big Mo about shabbos. Turns out the family I was going to stay with in the golan was in america, but that i could call this other person. I called and they said they didn't have room but that i could call this other person, who was a bit weird. I called Big Mo and he said these other "weird" people were actually very nice (inspiring artists = weird apparently ;) and I should call them. So I called them and they said they weren't planning to have anyone but I could call this other person to see if i could come for dinner. this other person was the first person I called and they said i could come for lunch on saturday.
As it turned out, the only reason I had a place to sleep with the not-lunch people is because the person I was going camping with had wanted to bring her five camping buddies with her (it was a two bedroom apartment, although this has been done before). When the not-lunch "weird" people said they weren't doing a big shabbos this week and that they could do shabbos camping on this nice beach nearby, they ended up with a place for me to sleep. And the dinner was lovely. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
Do not travel on Thursday afternoons or Sunday mornings in Israel. Well, duh. Shabbos. So this 4:20-7 bus didn't make it in to Tiveria until 8:30. The free bus around the kineret stops running at 8. The bus to Kiryat Shemona doesn't get there until 9:40 (and I only knew this because there were people at the bus stop who assured me it was going to come, despite the fact that it was not on the schedule). Of course, all of this could have been prevented if I'd gotten on the Kiryat Shemona bus in Jerusalem. Maybe.
Even though we missed the sunset, my friend, her friend and I camped out on the grass under the stars, talking nearly all through the night and catching the sunrise behind us (we were on the East side of the Kineret. View's better from Tiveria.) I actually have some photos and video from this adventure, which I'll post as soon as I can get my camera to work...
Long story short, I made my way to Tsfat in the morning, finally found a bookstore that had (a huge stack of) Jewish Meditation, picked up a small Tehilat Hashem siddur (so glad I have that), and made my way up the other hill to Juliet for shakra cleansing round two.
Shabbos in Tiveria (with, as it turned out, both of the two English speaking Chabad families in town) was calm and relaxing, the bus to Tel Aviv was chill, packed up and overlapped with Shani's arrival around 4am, then headed out to Ben Gurion for yet another uneventful travel excursion. Who knew transportation could be so un-dramatic? Un-wild...
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