Mt. Hermon trip continued...

Our second morning up north started with breakfast at the hotel and then some leisurely time to sit in our garden and enjoy the scenery.  When a van of soldiers pulled up in front our our door, I thought that they might be asking us to evacuate (during the night we heard rocket booms for over an hour).  The real truth was that their van was overheated and they needed some water for their radiator! 

The captain of the unit told us that we had been hearing nighttime training missions (the loud booms).  His unit of soldiers were from broken homes or men who had some other type of learning difficulty.  They were on their way to observe other military units who were learning how to fight in combat situations.  They were quite happy to pose for a picture.

Majdal Shams, nestled in the heights of the Hermon mountains, means "Tower of the Sun".  It is the largest of 4 Israeli Druze villages in the Golan and held only lovely encounters for us, whether shopping for groceries, getting the telephone repaired, fixing a flat tire, or just visiting with our new friend, Mah'di.  He is an auto mechanic who talked to us about the Druze who live in Israel as we sat in his shop, eating cookies and drinking coffee. He, along with the other Druze we met, seemed social and hospitable.  They told us stories about Druze of this small and tightly knit culture who were unable to see their families who were still in Syria.  The border crossing does not allow free passage back and forth.  Druze students studying at the university in Syria can go in the fall and return at the end of the school year.  Divided families can stand on the opposite sides of the border (with a 200 meter strip of land between them) and talk to each other by bullhorn.  One man described his mother-in-law who had not seen her brother in 30 years.  Although most of the Druze we met seemed happy enough to be living in Israel, they see themselves as being treated differently than the Jewish population.  The stories are uplifting and heartbreaking, all at the same time.

We continued to explore this very rich area of the Golan Heights.  We stopped at Nimrod's Castle, which is a sprawling Crusader Castle built in the 13th century. The ruins suggest how magnificent the castle must have been. It's easy to see why legend suggests that this fortress was build by the mighty hunter, Nimrod, from the generations before Abraham.  It stands on a mountain over 800 meters above sea level.  From there we "descended" back home to the southern Golan Heights and Moshav Nov, where Ariele and Avrami live.