Eastern Lower Galilee שביל עמק המעיינות יבנאל - נחל תבור - בית שאן

The bus door was just barely wider than the green backpack, but I squeezed out of it and into the town anyway. Low basalt houses lay against hazy green hills. After a few hundred meters the houses became orange trees with shadowy dark leaves. I followed the dirt road without shade which should have had red blazes, until a shortcut led uphill past an orange grove.

Well, as long as it was going past the orange grove it led uphill. After that it was vertical. After an hour or so of climbing I could see from Mt. Tabor to the Kinneret. As for mileage, I had one kilometer down and an indeterminate but unreasonably long distance to go, but you have to keep things in perspective.

View of the Kinneret and Jordan valley

The trail - with blazes - was a farm road going south. That is, because nothing in life is simple, it was a network of farm roads and mostly went south but sometimes decided that west or east would be much more fun. Tire tracks in the mud had baked very dry and very hard.

The trail-insofar-as-it-was-a-unitary-object went down into and came up from a wadi, which was very green and had a puddle in the channel (This is called winter). Further on, I saw a car, a few people, and a large black puppy. Feel free to guess which one of these wagged its tail and ran towards me.

Mt Tabor from the trail

"It's OK, he's a nice dog," one of the picnickers assured me.
I petted the puppy.
"You're alone? You need a ride?" Hitchhiking is much more accepted in Israel than in the US. My theory is that there's a sense of community and kinship leading to a sense that a stranger isn't a risk. That, or people think I'm lost.
"I'm all right."
He picked up the puppy and carried it back to the car.
"Where are you going to end up today?"
"Today I'm not ending up anywhere. Tomorrow - Beit She'an."
"You've got water?"
The water bottles were on the outside of my pack, but it's another thing people say to hikers.
"Yes, yes, thanks."

The area between the Kinneret and the West Bank is mostly rolling hills above deep wadis. The hills are farmland, and in early winter the wheat was just sprouting. The path kept turning. Mt. Tavor and Nazareth got further away, very slowly. Late in the day I climbed out of one last wadi up to an onion field on the hilltop. A man was lying in an impossibly relaxed way on the hard black earth next to it. He said something to me. After asking him twice what it was, I walked over to him.

The path

"You don't get tired walking around with a heavy pack all day?"
Well... 
"I enjoy it. I like hiking," was the best I could come up with.

The sunset lit the fields very softly. The path still crossed rolling hills, but the hills were very wide and round at the top instead of peaked or flat - like a pillow. I stopped at sunset just outside the next wadi, though it was a full moon night. I did some homework by the light of the full moon but couldn't actually tell whether it was legible or not.

I woke up at moonset. The moon faded, turned yellow and red just like the sun had, and sank slowly behind Nazareth. Stars appeared and brightened. A shooting star scampered across the sky, and the call to the morning prayer echoed quietly from the mosques across the Jordan valley. I lay in the dark for a few minutes, saw the first gray light in the clouds over Jordan, then got up, shivered, packed very quickly, shivered, and started walking. Stopping at sunset and starting at first light seems smart, but it was much darker now than in the moonlit night. I should have hiked at midnight - the full moon shone for miles.

Folded hills of Nahal Tavor

I made it down to the bottom of the wadi somehow without tripping over a wild boar, but nobody gave me a prize. It was light enough to see color, and the hills were greener than anything I'd seen in months. Winter means regeneration here. 
Gazelles leaped

Gazelle

uphill. I tried to imitate them; there were still a few dozen kilometers to go.

The terrain stayed the same, rolling hills with no shade until the wadi, full of dusty date palms and dusty motorcycles racing through. I climbed out of the wadi at high noon and looked down towards the Jordan valley and Beit She'an. A long way down. I wasn't high up, but most of that area is below sea level and hot. Even in the winter. 

I stumbled into Beit She'an in the late afternoon, late enough to be told that I didn't have much time before Shabbat. A sign warned that roads would be closed for a half-marathon, but for some reason I decided not to run it. I found the hotel after some confused wandering and texting.

"Who are you?" This was at the door.
"Are you asking what my name is, or what I'm doing here?"
I don't remember what the reply was, but they let me in. I was too exhausted to come up with the Hebrew words for Conservative Rabbis' Gathering.

I wonder how often people show up to it like that.