Our Middle East trip was book-ended by two amazing experiences: the Sahara desert camping at the end, and Old City Jerusalem in the beginning.  The kids invariably mention sleeping under the stars in the desert, and the cold dark walk through Hezekiah’s tunnel as the best part of our family adventure.

It was an epic day! My favorite part is a Emma snarking about an ancient Roman artifact: “It’s not a game board; It looks like a seat.”

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Here are a few newly edited photo’s from our first day in Jerusalem where we covered the old city on foot.  It was one of the most exhausting and exciting days of our entire trip – rivaling only the night in the Sahara in intensity.

Click on one for the slideshow.

Our Middle East posts are done! We still have about 60 percent of the video to compile and edit — it’s beginning to look like that may never get done.

They look great! Thanks to Trish for photographing, editing and producing these.

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These are transition days from Jerusalem to Amman, on to Cairo and finally Luxor. They weren’t particularly eventful.

We again crossed the bridge after saying goodbye the the American Colony, which is the kind of hotel you remember forever. Expensive at $540 per night, yes, but very memorable.

It’s a summer Thursday so it’s extra busy ahead of shabbat and Palestinians on summer vacation. The car line to get into the Israeli border complex is 90 minutes. Once inside, we forego the VIP service going back to Jordan on the advice of our driver. He claims the Jordanians don’t care as much so there aren’t lengthy lines. He’s totally right. An hour later we are in Jordan heading to Amman.

Amman contains a third of Jordan’s 6M inhabitants. What I saw was clean and very Western, but not very charming. We checked into the Sheraton but were already late to a business lunch, so we dashed off in another minivan for restaurant Centro. It was a very American menu, which was fortunate because Emma and Lily had declared (the night before) that they were boycotting french fries for a week. At Centro, Lily had spaghetti bolognese and Emma a pizza (no basil!).

The room at the Sheraton was not great. It was a tiny, smoking room with a busted AC. There was just a king bed and tiny single cot. Lily ended up between us by midnight. We’ve had a difficult time with sleeping arrangements at some hotels as a family of four. Most have a 3-person max policy but they enforce it erratically. Doubles are hard to find. We often get away with 4 by lying about Lily’s age.

The pool at the Amman Sheraton seemed to be a country club for locals and there were lots of bikini’s, bug-eye sunglasses and high-heels (usually in tandem). We ate a decent buffet dinner and went early to bed even before the US finished their day, which is midnight our time). The long days are taking their toll.

Friday, day 9 we go slowly to Egypt. It’s only 3 hours of flight time from Amman to Luxor but it chews up a full day with all the international hassle, an airport terminal change in Cairo and overly cautious travel agents that book really long connections. Trish and I thumb e-mail all day roaming from mobile provider to mobile provider. We have no mishaps besides Lily having trouble with ear pressure and arrive in Luxor around 8:30pm.

Our resort is called Sonesta St. George. I had tried for the historical Sofitel Winter Palace but they wouldn’t allow 4 in a room, no exceptions. I wanted to be downtown so the next best option, I was told by the agent, is one my guidebook calls ‘kitschy’ – a risky predicate for a hotel.

Don’t get me wrong, at $120 per night for a mini-suite on the 6th floor overlooking the Nile, it’s not a bad deal. The staff are genuinely nice. But the inside looks like the white-trash cousin of the Las Vegas ‘Luxor’ hotel. It’s got Pharaoh motifs stapled to a plywood wall in one section. They have a mini mall in the lobby with 24-hour souvenir shops hawking trinkets. Our room had a musty smell when it didn’t smell like burning cheese.  We ate in the courtyard, and the kebab was ghastly.

Trisha found a creepy cobwebbed ‘ballroom’ below the pool area. There was a Druse folk dancing group on the outdoor stage with no one watching. (They were cool.) Later it turned into a ‘disco’ but no one danced. In fact, I realized there were almost no guests! I begin to think that the few people I did see were trapped there like an Egyptian Hotel California. Yikes.

Trisha was against moving, and told me to calm down. But she changed her mind when she found out internet access was doled out in 30 min time cards for $8 apiece. I had already found it difficult to find a good hotel in Luxor, so I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Since I’m posting this late, I’ll let you know that it turned out great for us. But it took some effort to make happen. I slept fitfully.

[Photos by Trisha Creekmore]

Today was a slight drop from the fantastic success we’ve had each day so far. Our primary target; the Israeli Museum was mostly closed but some of our secondary targets turned out to be interesting. We ventured our beyond the Old city to the Jewish suburbs and most of our day was spent in a taxi ($200 on taxi fare!) Much of it could have been California if you ignored the Hebrew signage.

We left our fantastic room at the American Colony around 9 a.m. and grabbed our first ride. I had decided earlier to skip Bethlehem, thinking that a long ride was not worth a church. Luckily, the charming taxi driver, (who was doing tours of Petra from Jerusalem in the 70′s) convinced me to do it. We switched cars in Bethlehem, which is one of only a few christian towns in Israel or Palestine, and got a quick tour.

The Church is the oldest intact church in the world, and it was built on top of the cave where they kept animals: the famous manger. It was genuinely interesting on it’s own but the crowds of singing, chanting, prostrate tour groups from Italy that packed the place were also fantastic. There were gift shops everywhere.

On to Hadassa Hospital where we tried to find a plaque with the girls’ great-grandmother’s name inscribed. It turns out that it was in a different hospital, but they were able to show us pictures of it and were very helpful. There are a series of Chagall stained glass windows at the hospital synagogue that were amazing and worth the extra effort.

Yad Vashem was Emma and Lily’s first experience with the holocaust. We answered hundreds of questions from them as we went through the half-dozen memorials including a memorial to the exterminated children that I won’t forget. We couldn’t see the new museum as it is too graphic for kids.

The highlight of the day was supposed to be the Israel Museum where we would see the dead sea scrolls. And we did. They are amazing. But we also hoped to see the main building with some great modern and ancient art, especially the Islamic section. But it was closed for renovation. Doh.

Around the corner was the kids science museum of Hebrew University. If you’ve seen one kids science museum you’ve seen them all but they never fail to entertain. We made it back to the hotel by 4:30 and got ready for work. We both have several hours of meetings tonight.

[Photos by Trisha Creekmore]