Janna's Jerusalem Journies: Golan Heights (June 9, 2013)

As I have mentioned in my last couple blogs, Skye and I have been trying to squeeze all the travel we can into our last few months. Our bible study trip to the north (Nazareth, Sea of Galilee, etc) was supposed to be our last field trip, but we decided to do one more to the Golan Heights.

We rented a car and headed out for the 3 hour drive to the Golan Heights. Our first stop was the Nimrod Fortress. According to the pamphlet, Nimrod is Noah's great grandson. He was a great hunter and the king of Shinar. The fortress was built around 1229 with many additions throughout the century.

We arrived at the fortress, ate lunch and explored. It was really cool! It's at the top of Mount Hermon at 2675 feet above sea level. It was a beautiful area! We followed numbers on the map that took us along the walls and the most important locations. We explored towers, reservoirs, pools, a moat, tons of different rooms, and even a secret passage. The weather was also perfect! It was very breezy and much cooler than Jerusalem. Perfect for hiking around.

Next we drove to the Banias Falls. We followed a short little nature path that took us to the falls. It was amazing! On the way Veronica spotted these cute little animals, hyraxes. They look like huge hamsters or something. They're pretty impressive at climbing trees.

There were quite a few different trails we could take for various hikes. But the park closed at 4 and it was already 2:30 or so. We were trying to choose between doing one of the trails or going to more ruins down the way a bit. We got the best of both worlds because the ruins had their own little nature trails that were much shorter, so we drove to the ruins.

The first ruins we saw were the Temple of Pan (Paneas) ruins. This was a temple complex built for the god Pan, who lived in Nature. Herod's son, Philip, turned Paneas into Caesarea Philipi and made it the capital of his kingdom. It continued to be the capital during Agrippa's rule, and he added a palace and decorated the temples.

We explored the temple, then took the short nature paths to Agrippa's palace, and then to the Crusader gate and back to the temple again. The complex was built on a the Banias Springs which have really pretty clean water. The nature trails were very pretty. A lot of the time we were walking along the stream through very green trees. There is just something about all the green vegetation, it's so relaxing. There isn't much of it in Jerusalem so we were trying to soak it in.

On our way back to the car we saw another hyrax and tried to get a closer look only to discover, she was a mom with two baby hyraxes! They were so cute! Then we saw a lizard who had just shed his tail...that was less cute.

The Golan Heights are beautiful! I'm so glad we got to make the trip before leaving Israel. Big thanks to Dan and Veronica for doing the planning and research yet again!

Nimrod Fortress