Matt & Steph - Day 1

Another busy week for us :-) Steph and Matt arrived safe and sound on Thursday night. We got this great idea to try a different way to the airport and ended up about an hour late. Bummer. Good news is they got detained in customs for a bit and then had some ice cream while they waited for us. They were all smiles when I arrived. After catching up on their European travels, we asked what they had in mind for their trip to Israel. Only three things were on their list... Petra (in Jordan), the Dead Sea area (Masada), and the Galilee area. Since it was the beginning of our weekend we thought if they really wanted to get to Petra we better leave tomorrow! So Friday we drove to Eilat, the southern tip of Israel, through the Negev stopping at Ber Sheva on the way.

In Eilat we didn't really have reservations but the Guest House/Hostel that I've stayed at multiple times seems to always have availability. Since it cost about $200 a night when we went with my parents a few weeks ago, we thought we would try a couple other hotels in the area and see if we could get nicer accommodations for the same price. After looking around the guys did find a place for $150 a night and we brought our stuff in. Steph and I weren't as impressed with the cleanliness of the place but quickly put our swimsuits on and we were off to go snorkeling with our last hour of daylight. Not a lot of fish out at 5pm :-( Maybe tomorrow morning would be better? We came back to the hotel and upon closer inspection of the room became wary of our choice of hotels. The fire escape was all boarded up, there was mold in the bathtub/shower, the light switch didn't work, and there was a strong odor of smoke. We thought maybe we should go over to the Guest House/Hostel... at least there it's clean and we know what we are getting. Long story short, the guys went and determined there was availability at the other place and informed the front desk of the current hotel that we were unsatisfied with the room and would be moving out unless they had another room that would meet basic health code standards. Wish I could have been a fly on that wall. The manager was not happy with our decision, but we ended up leaving anyway. What a day, I was ready for bed!