Akko (Acre)

Above: Two pictures of old Akko. The top is Lily at the entrance to the walled city, the picture directly above shows the harbor area.

After breakfast, and a short battle with the car's security system, we headed north to Akko. We parked on a street in the new city, and walked toward the walled old city a few blocks away. Looking back, Akko is "Jerusalem lite." The main attraction is the crusader fortress, which is remarkably well-preserved. We had a pretty decent lunch and then went back to our car where Lily discovered some boutiques. I went searching for the post office in order to buy a phone card for our cell phone.

Before we left Juneau, I purchased an Israeli sim chip through a company called Cellular Abroad. Once you landed in Israel, you pop in the sim chip and you're hooked up with Cellcom, an Israeli phone provider. It turned out to be a great purchase, because the cell phone came in handy and Lily could call back to the US. The chip came loaded with minutes, but when they ran out you had to go to the post office to get a new card. After getting the code you'd load the minutes into the phone. At first, this was a huge problem, because for some reason the language was Arabic. It took a while to find someone at the post office who could follow Arabic instructions to change the language to English, where you could find the instructions for loading the minutes. It wasn't until we were in Eilat that we had it all straightened out.

We left Akko and found Highway 85 and headed off to Tiberias, where we had reservations at the Scots Hotel.

After driving a while, we decided to make a stop at Szafed, an old mountain city that is known as an artist colony and the home of Kabbalaism. That's where we had a close up look at Israeli security. We made the turn toward Szafed, and were waved through a police checkpoint. A mile or so later, we were stopped at a more serious checkpoint. The soldiers didn't speak English, but simply indicated we needed to turn around and head back. We were offered no explanation, but apparently there was some kind of celebration going on and the road we were on was closed to all but those specifically attending the event.

Highway 85, leaving Akko.