Burning the Inheritance

On Friday July 14th we left our little apartment on Olei Zion Street in Jaffa and began our trip to Jerusalem.  Jerusalem was a place we had been looking forward to visiting for quite some time and we were pretty excited that we were finally on our way there.  But, we went there with some…

Bidding farewell to Europe (for at least 90 days per the Schengen Agreement), we left Giovinazzo, Italy on Friday July 7th bound for Tel Aviv, Israel.  We had a taxi reserved to take us from our place in Giovinazzo to the Bari Airport, which was only about a 15 minute ride.  The flight, which was…

For our last week in Italy we were hoping to find a quiet place where we could relax (ideally on a beach) and get mentally and physically prepared for what promised to be a pretty grueling three week run through Israel and Jordan.  We decided to visit the region of Puglia (pronounced poo-lee-ah with the…

There is a peninsula south of Naples which stretches from Palermo to Sorrento with the Isle of Capri just off its tip.  A narrow road runs along this coast through a number of small sea-side towns including the well-known Italian beach towns of Positano and Amalfi.  This stretch, commonly known as the Amalfi Coast, is…

Italy Revisited While our original itinerary anticipated a single 34-day sweep south to north through Italy following Morocco, some necessary changes had allowed us to pass through Northern Italy just about three months earlier on the road from Vienna to Paris, stopping in Venice, South Tyrol, and Milano over the course of two weeks.  This…

Tangier straddles the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea at the Straits of Gibraltar and has, over its long history, been occupied by just about everyone.  Originally a small Berber town, it was then colonized as a Phoenician trading center as early as the 10th century BC, then the Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, and then…

On Tuesday June 13th, we caught an afternoon bus from the Fes bus terminal to Chefchaouen, a small city of about 40,000 people located in the Rif Mountains of northwest Morocco.  We stopped at a Moroccan truck stop near a town called Ouezzane where Colleen noticed a large number of tajines, each in its own…

We arrived in Fes via the train late in the afternoon of June 6th having spent the night before in Marrakesh.  As we were staying in the Medina (the old city) of Fes, we had again made arrangements to have a driver meet us at the train station.  He took us as close to the…

We left Sidi Ifni, Morocco at the crack of dawn on Monday June 5th as we had a pretty long day of travel ahead of us.  Whereas we broke up the drive down the coast over two days, we planned on driving all the way back to Essaouira in one shot, a drive of about…