ARTICLES

Joy and Saskia's Mediterranean Adventure

Day 22: Ptolemais and Caesarea

 
The theater in Caesarea-of-the-Sea

Saturday, December 5, 1998

THIS MORNING my cold had worsened, and I was in such bad shape I skipped breakfast. Instead, Joy brought me back some bread, cheese and fruit from the buffet.

We packed up and sorted our things into two piles: one to take to whatever island we were going to, and the other to store at the Athens airport. Our luggage was now reduced down to one daypack each. I wore jeans, T-shirt, flannel shirt, socks and shoes. In my pack were black pants, more socks, another T-shirt and two long-sleeved tops, underwear, spiral notebook, camera, video camera with battery charger, Urantia Book, barest necessities of toiletries, tiny travel coffeemaker, a small tin of Nescafé, powdered creamer, wine opener, serrated-edge knife, and travel documents. Remarkably, all of this fit into my daypack. Around my waist I wore a fanny pack with wallet, sunglasses, and cosmetic bag. Joy was similarly outfitted.

Before leaving this morning I made some coffee in the room and touched up my roots with a do-it-yourself product from the local supermarket. We paid the bill ($283), packed up the car, and were on the road to Acre by 10 a.m.

Our route indicated by green dots

Acre, an ancient historical seaport, was a nice little town but because we didn’t think it had any UB references, it didn’t seem very interesting to us. (With a little research we later learned that it was known as Ptolemais in Jesus’s day, and that he had been there repeatedly.)

After giving it the once-over, we found a table at a kabob restaurant with a view of the Mediterranean, and there we sat eating and studying up on Caesarea-of-the-Sea, which was to be our next stop.  

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Soon we were heading down the coast past the industrialized modern Jewish city of Haifa, getting a glimpse of Mt. Carmel as we passed by. We were unimpressed with the places we saw along the coast until we arrived in Caesarea, which we found it to be one of the most interesting of all the sites we had seen so far. 

Layout of the city

There were many hints in Urantia Book about what Jesus saw and did in Caesarea:  

JESUS IN CAESAREA Jesus and his friends tarried in Caesarea beyond the time expected . . . . During the evenings Jesus and his friends strolled about on the beautiful wall which served as a promenade around the port.  Ganid greatly enjoyed Jesus' explanation of the water system of the city and the technique whereby the tides were utilized to flush the city's streets and sewers. This youth of India was much impressed with the temple of Augustus, situated upon an elevation . . .  The temple Jesus saw, "built on a podium" Remains of the temple  . . . and surmounted by a colossal statue of the Roman emperor.  A statue believed to be of the emperor The second afternoon of their stay the three of them attended a performance in the enormous amphitheater which could seat twenty thousand persons, . . . A section of the enormous amphitheater . . . and that night they went to a Greek play at the theater. These were the first exhibitions of this sort Ganid had ever witnessed, and he asked Jesus many questions about them.  The theater On the morning of the third day they paid a formal visit to the governor's palace, for Caesarea was the capital of Palestine and the residence of the Roman procurator. [1429]   Ruins of the Governor's palace

We arrived around 3:45 and it was already getting dark. Now here was a place where we could have spent an entire day! Side by side with the archeological activity, they were reconstructing the city to be as it once was, and building restaurants and gift shops right into the ancient walls. 

A restaurant built into the ruins

We strolled along the promenade (it was still being excavated) where Jesus and Ganid once walked, looked into the great aqueducts that once cleared the city of sewage, and gazed upon the ruins of the temple of Augustus. I got the impression that most of these ruins had only been unearthed since the late 1950s, so it was of particular interest that the Urantia Book--written decades earlier--went into such detail about what Jesus and his friends saw.

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With the sun going down we drove in a straight line toward Ben Gurion airport, near Tel Aviv. Our flight to Athens would leave at 8:40 a.m. the next morning. We got stuck in a commuter traffic jam and arrived at the airport around 5:30 p.m. to survey the scene. Car drop-off before our flight would be easy, and a guard directed us to the Avia Hotel for the night, about ten minutes away, said to be popular with airline crew members.

After checking into our room we went down to the hotel dining room for our final Israeli meal. It was the Sabbath, so it was very quiet. Apart from a group of black men from Africa at a nearby table, we were the only guests. Nobody was conversing and there was no background music. A sign read, “Please refrain from smoking on Friday nights and Saturday.”

As we sat having a cocktail, writing letters and postcards, our waiter, a young man from Russia, began plying us with questions about the United States, a place he dreamed of moving to one day. When he saw that we were both friendly, he began to pamper us, offering us olives, pickles, and chocolate-on-the-house along with our drinks.

This evening turned into a fiasco. The waiter (who did not seem to be supervised) started bringing us free drinks--in fact, a whole bottle of powerful liquor--and when he got off work he came and sat with us, having a few drinks himself before he had to leave, as someone was outside to pick him up. I don’t remember much after that.

(I found out later that he had asked Joy for her telephone number in Oregon and, in a state of mild intoxication, she gave it to him. Months later, he called her from Israel saying he was coming to America and wanted her to help him get settled. She told him “no,” but shortly thereafter he called her again, this time from New York, asking if he could visit her in Oregon. She did not return his phone calls.)

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or read on by clicking on any of the following links:

1. From Los Angeles to Amsterdam
2. The Flight to Greece 
3. Ancient Corinth 
4. The Citadel
5. To Piraeus
6. Hania on Crete
7. A Day in Limbo
8. Back to Athens
9. From Athens to Cairo
10. Cairo
11. The Pyramids
12. The Bus to Israel
13. Jerusalem
14. Bethany and Bethpage
15. An Old Palestinian Hotel
16. The Drive to Galilee
17. Capernaum and Environs
18. The Ancient Boat and Nazareth
19. The Golan Heights and Mt. Hermon
20. The Eastern Shore and Scythiopolis
21. Mount of the Beatitudes
22. Ptolemais and Caesareathis page
23. A Day in Piraeus
24. Santorini
25. A Rainy Day
26. An Eventful Day in Athens
27. Return to Amsterdam
28. Going Home