Off-Roading and Camping in the Negev!

Last week we had a significant break from Ulpan for the holiday of Shavuot.  I believe this holiday celebrates the time when God gave to Torah to the nation of Israel on Mount Sinai, but don't quote me on that because my knowledge of religious significance is mostly based on Wikipedia.  Anyway, from Monday night we were on vacation, and when I told my cousins that I would have a significant break for the holiday they invited me to join them on an off-roading trip in the Negev desert in southern Israel.  My cousin's husband is from the Mizpe Ramon, which sits right on a giant crater that's 40 km wide, and was carved out by water and tectonic plate movement (whereas other craters are sits of bomb blasts or fרםצm meteors that collided with Earth). It,s absolutely beautiful. Here's a pic from above the "Machtesh" as the crater is called in Hebrew.

On Tuesday afternoon we set out for Mizpe Ramon, stopping at Be'er Sheva on the way.  I had driven through the Negev before on my way to Arad and Eilat, but I had never spent a significant amount of time in the desert. There's something beautiful about the vast emptiness and quiet that comes with the desert.  As my cousin's husband said, out here it's just you and god, and he wasn't kidding.  No cell reception, running water, or electricity, just good old-fashioned family time.  

This trip marked the first time that I had been off-roading for more than a couple of hours.  I couldn't believe some of the roads and passages that we drove through because they were so riddled with rocks and dips that if taken at high speeds will destroy your car.  Some of the descents and hills looked impassable to me, and I was shocked when we would drive down paths that consisted solely of giants rocks.  One such path was even challenging to climb on foot, and Yaniv (my cousin's husband) climbed it with his Trooper.  See the video below to check out the climb.  

Overall the trip was really amazing.  I saw a part of the country that I had never seen before, and spent more quality time with my family.   My favorite part has to be that I drove during the trip on Wednesday and Thursday.  Going off-roading and camping out in the desert is something that I can definitely see myself doing in the future, and I can't wait to go back.  Here are a few more pics of the few, and a video that my cousin put together.   Enjoy :-).

Couldn't get a direct feed from Youtube, but here's the link for the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu9fX0e7SHs