Yes, Trenna even said, “I’ve hit a new low.” But I guess you could say that things could only go up from here. It’s hard to admit it, but I think we’re the lowest we’ve ever been.
Today we went to the Dead Sea!!! (The lowest place on earth, for the geographically challenged among us. 1407′ below sea level, to be exact.)
What makes the Dead Sea unique, aside from it’s altitude, is that it is the most mineral-saturated body of water in the world at 32%. And that makes it much denser than normal water. And that means that you float much higher in the water than usual. When we realized that we could easily raise our legs out of the water due to our new-found buoyancy, Trenna and I spontaneously broke into an amazing sequence of synchronized swimming.
It’s also unique in that the additional 1/4 mile of air above you means that you don’t have to wear sunscreen for a couple of hours of full exposure. And the increased air density due to that thicker column of air means that you can exert yourself more without getting winded.
We started the day at Qumran, which was probably Trenna’s top moment of the trip, as she has studied it so much. What’s amazing to me is that it took so long to find the scrolls. I always thought that the caves that contained the scrolls were back in the middle of some large complex of mountains and valleys that humans seldom ever passed through. As it turns out, you can see the cave where the first scrolls were found clearly from Qumran and anywhere for miles. LOL. That kind of reinforces the idea that God was waiting for the right time for the right shepherd to be trying to find the right sheep.
And we went to Masada. That was very nice and an impressive sight both from a distance and from the top. Trenna and I (unlike 960 others) made it back down just fine.