Day 3 & 4 - Friday, July 10th & Saturday, July 11th

On Friday, we left Tel Aviv in the early morning and arrived in Haifa around 10am. We went straight to the practice field which was where we had practice 4 years ago. A bit of a deja vue for some of us who participated back in 2005 when we won the Silver Medal (l-r: DKNY, Parks, Goldy, Kronick, Me, Z).

We then headed over to our hotel, the Dan Carmel, to get settled in. After lunch, we then had a 2nd practice. As it was close to Shabbat, the Sabbath time, the field was closed. But that didn't stop us Yankees. We all climbed the metal fence surrounding the field and went about our business.

In the evening we had a Shabbat dinner at the hotel. The Maccabiah organization had some rabbi come and lead us in a little short service and say some prayers and sing some songs. I guess we have to do something Jewish on this trip.


On Saturday we planned another practice session at our favorite field. Since it was Shabbat, we pretty much figured it was going to be closed. So we used a little common sense and pulled the car up to the fence and hopped on over. Much easier than trying to climb this thing this way. Of course, the guy who rented the car will have to pay extra for all the dents we put on the trunk, but that's his problem. We got about 20 minutes into our practice when some Security Guard came over and threw us off the field. He walked through the fence but made us climb back over to leave.

So we went to Plan B and went sightseeing after lunch. As you can see, food plays a major part in this trip. We visited this area called Caesearea. It was an old Roman era harbor fort city. The first thing we stopped at was the old Roman aqueduct which carried water from the North down to the South. It runs right along the beach. We then headed over to the harbor area which has ruins dating back to the Roman times - hippodrome, amphitheatre, bath houses, etc... Real interesting how they built all this without any mechanical tools whatsoever. Amazes me how they can do all this and we can't get some decent roads to drive on. Hung out in the pool for a little bit when we got back and then had a team Shabbat dinner at the hotel. A post dinner jaunt to the Bear Pub up the street to celebrate the end of Shabbat was had.


As you can see I'm just starting to learn how use this blog thing so now I can add pictures as I go. Unfortunately I'm using a wi-fi connection outside the hotel (the hotel wanted to charge $100/week to use their hotel wireless connection so I'm forced to find a free signal outside to connect to. I'm not going to let "the Man" get me down.). So I'll be going back and adding pictures to my other pages to liven them up.