We then drove south to Acre (also known as Akko), which is an old Turkish fortress that has been used throughout the ages. Literally for the past 5,000 years or so. (No, it wasn’t Turkish 5,000 years ago, but you know what I mean.) On the way down, we passed part of the Roman Aqueduct that fed into Ceasarea, which we would see later on. We also saw a Turkish Aqueduct, which was a bit more sturdy. We explored Acre for a bit, seeing the various archaological digs in the compound, which was pretty cool. Even heard some bats. (And smelled their guano… yuck.) We then came out of the site into…. a store. Of course – gotta buy those trinkets! Everyone got something, it seemed, but when we left the store, we ran into some more vendors. Uh oh. And there was more to buy. And we were getting hunnnnngry. We were spit out into a rather dingy part of Acre, so we high-tailed it back to the van, which turned out to be fruitless since Eli couldn’t get the damn thing unlocked. Apparently his “hi-tech” locking system wasn’t exactly working properly. Joy. Finally, after a few minutes of fiddling with it, we got it going, and headed to Haifa for lunch.
We didn’t have anything in mind, really, so we drove up Mt. Carmel to the top (stopping to look at the vista from the top overlooking the Bahai Temple), and found a delightful falafel place which was claiming to be the “best falafel in Haifa”. Well, it was certainly damn good! After that, we headed on down to Caesarea.
Let me say a little something about our tourguide. Eli wasn’t exactly the type of person who could do two things at once. Say, for example, talk and drive. As tour guides go, that’s kinda bad. He had a rather frightening ability to straddle and coast into other lanes, and not really notice the other cars. Eeks! We probably narrowly avoided 5 accidents during the drive from Haifa to Caesarea.