Endlessly Discovering Jerusalem

Pesach vacation this week for kids so time for thinking of new things to do with them. Yesterday, there were all sorts of possibilities from Seguay tours to guided walks to open-sided covered vehicles. Seguays, in case you haven't seen them, are powered wheel-based platforms on which you stand holding on the handlebars and directing it with slight body movements. They are stable, easy to master and fairly slow but marvelous for moving around on roads or sidewalks while the cars are jammed up. Now it is a tour option with guide. We, that is, Max and I and Itay and Alex our eldest grandchildren from Tel Aviv, and Daniel and 4 of his kids decided on a tour thru a 400 meter section of an ancient Hasmonean water tunnel that carried water from two springs south of Bethlehem to the Temple Mt. The system depended on a 300 foot difference in altitude between the southern springs and the Temple Mount. In order to accomplish this completely by gravity the engineers more than 2,000 years ago had to design a serpentine rockcut system that preserved a constant small gradient. On a very hot day such as it was yesterday--close to 90 degrees--walking for some half hour in a cool tunnel, dark and narrow though it was, was a pleasure. As many times as we have walked in this area over the years we never knew about this long stretch of walkable preserved tunnel. It is only opened by pre-arrangement with guides. All this was followed by swimming in our neighborhood pool and a BBQ by Max and me with contributions by Wendy and Saul for 15 of us in our shaggy but poetic garden garden.