Day Trip to the North

This morning Benjamin texted us at 8:45 to see if we were awake yet. A fair question. One of us was, and the other one got up quickly. Benj had a new plan for the day.

We rounded up Mika from her playdate at the park with Yael's Moms group (they are the cloth diaper/hippy moms).  Mika spends time every day in this park, about three blocks up the street from their house. It has a squishy Astoturf surface, swings, a few other play structures, trees -- all behind a big fence. Everything is always behind a big fence, with gates or doors. 

We headed out of Haifa, going north to a nature preserve in the Hula Valley. Yael had asked a friend for suggestions of places to go with someone who was walking-impaired (she was talking about me, but Mika has very short legs and wouldn't get very far either). They had golf carts there!

As we left the city (which is pretty big and sprawling, covering the whole ridge with high rises and low rises), we got back out into country that I recognized from our last trip -- lots of fields, ocean off to the left, big highways, greenery.  I like the scale of agriculture that is along the roads. It is human scale, you can see to the ends of the rows. I know they use a lot of equipment and possibly not that many humans, but still the whole thing looks manageable and intensive.  The soil is dark brown. Wouldn't say that we saw much evidence of organic farming (big spray rigs going), but farming is farming and they are growing some food here. Artichokes, olives, fruit trees. There were big swooping vistas with hills and valleys, green on the hills (Benjamin says this the greenest time of year, doesn't get any greener than this).

After about two hours, we pulled into a big parking lot that was full of buses and cars. Felt like a holiday, but we don't think it is.  It was a sunny, clear day, about 70 degrees F.  The guy at the gate said we should buy one handicapped ticket for me but we didn't. I am not handicapped, I am just walking with a cane, and it works pretty well. I feel like Uncle Babe. 

We rented a golf cart, bought some sunscreen for Mika and joined the crowd. Like most of the tourist destinations we have been to in this country, it was low-key and they didn't seem to have any worries about safety or rules. I guess anyone can drive a golf cart, really. The roads were one way, they had arrows on them, the terrain was flat and if someone was dumb enough to drive right into the water, that would be their problem.  They also rented regular bicycles and recumbent bikes that looked really hard to pedal (especially the women with the long skirts). This place seemed to be a good place for families -- the same kinds of families that flew with us from Dulles (little boys with tzitzit and kippot, men in black hats, women in wigs and black skirts). We were not in a hurry because we had 90 minutes to travel 1.2 km, and after about 75 minutes we found we had only made it halfway. We dawdled through the "botanical garden" (which was really a path with little bridges crossing over waterways, and some green stuff growing low to the ground and some bushy trees) and we had a brief pause at a picnic table to recharge Mika with a banana.  It took us a while to find the real birds, but there were lots of little ones bopping around on the ground.

Across the waterway (not a creek or a stream, more like canals) there were hundreds or thousands of chunky white birds, grazing. They were cranes, en route between Europe and Africa. They stop here in January and February. There is a joint project between the Jewish National Fund, some other group that preserves nature and the local farmers -- they have created a refuge for these cranes so they won't go and eat all the crops around here. I did wonder why all those birds stay in that one big area. They feed them corn. They call it a Crane Foraging Area but it is really a Crane Feedlot.  But no one eats them, they get to leave whenever they want.  

We learned some more interesting facts about the birds that come to this nature preserve (about 280 kinds) and then we turned in our golf cart and headed back. Benjamin asked Google to find us a restaurant on the way back to Haifa and it directed us to an unlikely looking tiny little place called Basil (in Hebrew). Pizza and salads. No one else was there, we sat outside at a table, the view was limited but the food was fine. 

On the way back home, Mika slept part of the way and needed some fruit to keep her going the rest of the way. She doesn't have too many recognizable words but she likes to identify the people in the car (dada, papa, points to me and I say Grana, points to herself and I say Mika). Benjamin, after some thought, once said that Mika's top four favorites, in this order are: mama, the swings, banana, daddy.  When I told Yael this, she thought about it for a moment and agreed with his assessment.  But she does love her daddy. And she does have words that I don't understand. We added "golf cart" and "Haifa" to her vocabulary today. 

Yael didn't come with us because she had other things to do all day, and in fact we didn't see her after we left her in the park this morning. Mika breezed through her evening routine with one or the other of her doting adults, eating soup, playing for a while, having a bath, and going to bed. Jon and Benjamin started working on a project they will do tomorrow -- they made a cardboard template of a curved entryway bench that will hold shoes and detritus.

This nice weather wraps up pretty soon, and we will hit a long, rainy spell. So it was wonderful to see the great outdoors today. And we got to see Benjamin and Mika for a whole day. Doesn't get better than that, except that we didn't get to see Yael. But we have a whole week left.

In the visitor's center.

The traditional picnic table picture.

She remembered golf carts.

Can't identify any, but they are birds.

These are the corn-fattened cranes -- not sheep.

A nutria, or coypu -- also known as a spiny rat. Brought from South America for fur-farming, but was less than satisfactory. Released into the wild they soon became a destructive invasive species, don't you know.

Creating the template for the bench. Hopefully we will see the real thing tomorrow.