23rd day (Grey)

This chapter is going to be a bit like our last walk. Short and boring. For those readers looking for thrills, this blog  won't be anywhere near as hot as the 30 plus degrees we walked through. Mid October is meant to be cool(er). We figured that a 1 p.m. midweek start would be ok. It isn't, after-all, August, is it?

After some gentle physical persuasion we were happy to welcome Tracey back into our midst after a long hiatus. The truth be told, it had been quite a while for all of us since we last walked.
After meeting Tracey at the entrance of the large Haredi town of El-ad, we drove to the starting point,  the Baptist Centre. How's that for a contrast? Starting with the Baptists and finishing with the Haredis . I'm not too sure which was more foreign to us.
 Who would have thought that on the head-waters of the Yarkon, between the built-up areas of Petach Tikva and Rosh Ha'Ayin, there would be a Baptist centre? More surprisingly it was here on the Yarkon and not on the Jordan river, a place far more holy to those that believe that being baptised will help them get into the next world. What? Israelis have suddenly become too tactful to point out that they're baptising in the wrong river? That's a bit hard to believe ! At any rate, that was our starting point.
It says something about the tone of the day's proceedings when the highlight of the day comes 15 minutes after we start. After a short walk along a reed lined path that brought back memories of our previous less than successful stroll along the Yarkon, we stumbled upon the Oferim Pools. This quaint little pond covered in water lilies seemed straight out of a Monet painting. A rare sight in Israel, to be sure. Peace and tranquillity, 10 minutes from the heart of Petach Tikva. The Monet fantasy was all the more complete with a group of four young girls serenely picnicking on the banks of the pond. I'm not sure that the two Israeli rock-apes, smoking, playing loud mizrachi (eastern-style) music and throwing rocks into the still pond were part of the Monet mindset, but this,after all, the middle-east , not southern turn-of-the-century France. It was one thirty already and we hadn't eaten lunch, so barely half an hour after we got out of Yoni's car we sat down in the shade of a big tree besides the lily pond and had some sandwiches.

As is often the case when you find yourself in such an idyllic place, it was hard to get up and continue with the task at hand. Someone may have even suggested that we backtrack to the car and drive the remaining 10 or so kilometres. After a long, silent pause we decided that we just couldn't look at ourselves in the mirror if we decided to drive.
After a few kilometres of flat, hot, shadeless, gravel-pathed walking we came to the entrance of the Tel Afek National Park. We'd walked past it from behind and it looked quite interesting. It is the site of the ancient city of Antipatris, built by Herod in honor of his father, Antipater II of Judea (isn't wikipedia great?). It's only natural that Shvil Yisrael would include such a monumental land mark, right? Wrong. Just as it didn't go through the Yarkon Springs National Park, next to the Baptist Centre, here too it dodges around the national park, not through it. Why? Don't know. Add it to the myriad of questions we have for Mr. Shvil Painter when we finish the shvil, sometime around 2025. Instead we walked past the abandoned, broken down Rosh Ha'Ayin train station, which looks like the perfect setting for a horror film. We also walked past the first pillbox (round sentry station shaped like a pillbox) the British built in Palestine. Whoopee!

We did see one other lone walker out on the trail, walking towards us. He looked a little older than us and had a vaguely familiar gait. We thought it was Sol, our blog pen-pal and co-walker from the first day of our previous leg. But no,it was just a guy out for a stroll, in the middle of no-where. His resemblance to Sol was a mirage, brought on by the blazing sun.
Garry and Tracey were especially under duress. Garry once again carried an injury inflicted upon him by Lea, his basketball playing daughter. One day soon he's going to have to come to the realisation that as he gets older and Lea gets bigger, he's fighting a losing battle. Tracey had trouble coping with the heat and looked very flushed. We felt bad having forced her to come back and walk with us on a day this hot.

"Grey"  about sums up the walk. Grey shadeless paths past old wrecked buildings, grey shadeless paths through empty fields, grey shadeless paths next to railway tracks and grey shadeless paths next to roads, especially Kvish 6. We're not used to hearing loud traffic along the route but today, next to Israel's central highway, we had to yell just to hear each other. If on previous grey summer walks we would remind ourselves that it would look totally more appetising in the winter and spring, here we were in agreement that it would be just as flat and boring in any season, just green rather than grey. Despite all this complaining, it was great to be back on the shvil. We were a little shaken by our failure on the 2nd day of our previous leg and needed this short, less challenging section just to stretch the shvil legs again. Once again we realised that it wasn't necessarily the route but the company and the experience that makes us keep coming back to the shvil.

Heat has a tendency to take your appetite away and we finished the walk hot and not very hungry. My son Gal had the next day off from his Shnat Sherut so we picked him up on the way home. Gal is always hungry, as most 19 year olds are. His hunger was contagious, so we stopped at a slightly up-market (only slightly) Abu Abu called El Sultan, in the Bedouin village of Zarzir. The usual hummus was accompanied by a large portion of mansaf. Large, but not too large for the three meat-eaters.Finishing the day's walk in a local restaurant is another good shvil tradition that we were happy to get back to.