“It’s wonderful there. You’ll love it!” Over the last few weeks, I must have heard these or similar sentiments from a dozen friends and family to whom I mentioned that we had booked to go away with our kids and grandkids for a couple of nights at Nof Ginosar, a hotel on the Kinneret. To give credit where credit’s due, and to be more accurate, Esther – taking matters into her own hand and pity on her decreasingly competent father – actually made the booking, and then presented us, slightly abashedly, with a fully cancellable fait accompli. We were thrilled, doubly so when we checked the hotel out online. The only adjustment we made was to change the bed and breakfast booking to half-board, which meant that, for our entire stay, we never had to leave the hotel.
I have to say that the hotel certainly lived up to the build-up our friends gave it. Despite being fully booked (we are, after all, talking about the first week of August), and despite some 95% of the bookings being for families with children, the hotel, even the pool, never seemed overcrowded or unbearably noisy. This was partly because the hotel rooms are spread over four low-rise buildings in a fairly large, lawned campus. This means that the hotel lobby is not always packed, and the guests milling around are usually milling around in the open air.
The pool had only opened weeks earlier after a major makeover, which must have included extending the surrounding seating area to include enough sun loungers for all the guests using the pool. Between the pool, a small but imaginative climbing-frame area, the Kinneret itself, only 200 metres from the hotel, the children’s games room, and entertainment in the evenings, there was enough to keep our three musketeers busy and happy all day.
Food was very plentiful, and surprisingly good both in the range of choices and the quality of the preparation. However, the highlight of the couple of days was seeing how our three older grandsons moved from cautious exploration of each other to being a team. By the time we left, Raphael and Ollie, both four years old, were best mates, and Tao, who, in many of his social groups in Portugal is one of the younger members of the group, was embracing wholeheartedly his role as leader of the gang. Raphael clearly idolises him, and the three of them form a very solid unit.
Meanwhile, Adam enjoyed demonstrating his recently acquired independent eating skills and found the entire experience a sensory delight. He is still a constant smiler, and spent the entire time melting stranger’s hearts.
On the second day, Bernice and I took the three older boys on an open-sided bus tour of the kibbutz. Clearly attracting young families, the tour was curious in that the only child-oriented activity was a visit to the cowsheds, principally to see, and stroke, the newborn calves. None of our three felt brave enough to feed the cows, but they did stroke the calves, even Tao who, after a couple of minutes, had to escape the stench of the cowshed.
The remaining 40 minutes of the hour-long tour were taken up with explanations. One such explanation was of the national water project feeding excess water into the river that forms one border of the kibbutz, from where the water flows into the Kinneret, in an attempt to brings its level back up from its current very low measure. I found this interesting, but the three boys, with a combined age of 15, were significantly less impressed.
The same was true of the account of the founding of the kibbutz, overnight, by the erection of a tower and stockade, such a construction meaning, under then Ottoman law, that the erectors could not be evicted. This particular account was soured for me by the fact that our guide, having detected my accented Hebrew and asked me where I was from originally, made me, as a representative of His Majesty’s Government, the villain of that particular foundation story. I decided not to point out to him that, had it not been for His Majesty’s Government’s Balfour Declaration in 1917, any Jewish claim to the right to resettle in the Land of Israel would have been rejected out of hand by the nations of the world.
One highlight of our stay, for me, was seeing, up close in the pool, what a competent and confident swimmer Raphael is becoming. He has taken up swimming as enthusiastically as he throws himself into everything, and it’s lovely to see.
From the Kinneret, we, and Micha’el and family, returned to Maale Adumim. After another lovely Shabbat together, they set off in our car on Sunday to stay with Esther for a few days. We followed them on Monday, in Esther and Maayan’s second car, and I am writing this on Monday evening, in the Airbnb Bernice and I are staying in, five minutes’ drive from Esther, having spent a hectic afternoon and evening in the park and at their home. When Bernice and I slipped away at 9:00PM, the three musketeers were giving an almost convincing impersonation of winding down after a pretty holidayish evening. Our bedsit certainly feels, by contrast, very peaceful.
Unfortunately, we inadvertently rather spoilt Micha’el and family’s day yesterday. On their drive up to Zichron, they stopped for petrol, and, when they had filled up, the car failed to restart. Eventually, another driver offered them a jump-start with leads, and this worked. As a result, Micha’el and Esther had to waste time today taking the car to a garage for a new battery.
I, like many of you, am old enough to remember when you maintained a battery by topping it up with distilled water, and it served you faithfully for years and years, These days, batteries are maintenance-free, cost a king’s ransom, and die, without warning, a week after the one-year warranty runs out. Exactly which aspect of that scenario represents progress evades me at the moment.
Still, I suppose I have to say that these should be our worries. I’m certainly counting my blessings.
And now, although I am over 400 words short of my target, you’ll have to excuse me stopping here. Something tells me I need to get a good night’s sleep if I’m going to be up to partnering Bernice in taking our threesome to the model farm and toy tractor driving track tomorrow morning.
