Being thanksgiving day and all, I figure the kids shouldn't be going to school. On top of that the weather was unseasonable warm. I talked to Sarah who said it was 27 degrees in Boston. Well in Ra'anana it was almost 27 also -- but Celsius. On Thursday's Dani has two periods of Math, two of English and two of science. All the classes are taught by someone other than his homeroom teacher, because today is his homeroom teacher's day off. I figured, if she has the day off, then maybe Dani should too.As a digression, it is an interesting system here. The kids go to school 5 days a week, but the Ed. department recognizes that it would be too much to have the teachers teach 6 days a week, so teachers get a day off in the middle of the week. (Actually today was also Miriam's teacher's day off. I dropped Miriam off at 8:05 -- late, and the substitute was still not there. I tried to convince the class that I was the substitute for about 5 minutes, but had a hard time grabbing their attention. 30+ kids, that's too many for me. Eventually I left, just as the real substitute arrived.)
Anyways, on Tuesday after exercising at the Gym together, Dena and I stopped by the bike store to get her a bike. Being there I noticed a book on mountain biking trails for kids in Israel. Even though it was in Hebrew, I couldn't resist. So book in hand, I plotted out a route near Zichron Ya'akov in the hills, down to Binyamina along the shore. Dani though said he would prefer road biking to off-road biking. So we decided to just wing it. I'd heard that there is a nice trail along the Yarkon river in Tel Aviv. Searching on the Web I couldn't find much information, and my new book didn't have an info either. Just the same, we threw the bikes into the car, and headed for the parking lot at the Tel Aviv power plant where the Yarkon river dumps into the ocean. So far so good. We even saw painted bicycles on the sidewalk near the parking lot. It was no problem finding the path a long the Yarkon. It is paved for the first 8km or so, and made for great biking. Actually, as this is part of the Israel Trail (a hiking trail from the northern tip of Israel all the way to Eilat) for much of the 8km you can choose to ride either on the pavement, or on a dirt path along side the pavement. I tried both. The tail reminds me of the path along the Charles river in Boston.
At the end of the huge Yarkon Park, we got to a huge traffic intersection undergoing construction. Nobody seems to have explained to the government that more you pave, the more traffic you produce. (I just hope the projects here are cheaper than Boston's big dig). We lost the trail after the intersection and started biking along city streets. I was getting lost and we could not longer see the Yarkon river. All of a sudden though, we passed a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, and I started to recognize the place -- hey, we are in Attidim -- the industrial park where EMC is located. Wow. Then we passed a bike store. We popped in and got directions to the bike trail. We really were not too far off course -- though now the trail was all off road. We went through quite a bit of mud, crossed Kvish 4 (route 4), and followed the river for awhile, until we decided we'd had enough of the off road trail. Turned around had lunch in the Yarkon park, and finally back to the car to drive to Ra'anana. All in all maybe 18 km, and lots of fun.
One neat thing that we saw along the path was water fountains that had a special place to fill water bottles. That's pretty nifty!
