Delight

I have a big birthday coming up very soon - okay, it's my 40th - and this last weekend my husband really came up trumps and organised a wonderful 'birthday weekend' away, tailored to all my wishes and desires! I knew that he had planned for us to go away but had no idea where we were going or what we were going to be doing. The kids were lucky enough to be invited to friends for three whole days and so Thursday morning came around and we set off for our short break together - something we have not had the opportunity to do for many years.
I took so many photographs over the three days that I have decided to split my post up into two parts. This first post is bursting with photographs of the magical little zimmer (the Israeli B&B is known as a zimmer - German for room) where we stayed.'Hemdatya', with roots in the word 'delight', can be found at Moshav Ilaniya in the Lower Galilee. As you can see from my photos, the place was more than a 'delight', it was a dream! I don't think I have ever stayed in a place where so much attention has been paid to every single little detail.
The stone houses where we slept and ate our delicious breakfast were originally farmers' homes, from the time when Ilaniya was a pioneer farm, worked by settlers of the Second Aliyah, among them the young David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister. They have been restored to perfection and are both environmentally friendly (though I can't say that the composting toilet really appealed to me!) and equipped with modern facilities. We managed to catch the results of the British election whilst relaxing in this little piece of paradise in northern Israel!
While each house has it's own delightful little porch, all the rooms are situated in a beautiful courtyard, surrounded by an ancient stone wall. Lush green and blooming plants, a small vineyard, stunning flower beds and vegetable patches which provided us with some of the ingredients for our delicious breakfast fill the area.
Breakfast was a whole nother story. Frankly, the longer we sat and enjoyed both the food and the area around us, the more food our friendly proprietor brought us! This culminated in a quick shot of some sort of homemade cherry liqueur on our second day there, at 10'o'clock in the morning! As I have already mentioned, much of the food we ate was homegrown and used in mouthwatering jams, pastries and salads. We saw deep purple eggplants growing in the vegetable patch, next to huge cauliflowers, broccoli and cabbages.
In my next post I plan to tell you what we got up to during our days in the Galilee area, but what I will tell you now is that we did manage to squeeze in a dip in the beautiful stone pool and to while away quite some time in the hammock hanging between the olive trees. The little frog, in the photo above, along with his friends, kept us amused with his constant croaking, both day and night. It didn't bother us in the slightest. We just felt so privileged to be able to spend quality time in such a beautiful location.