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Hotel Dan's breakfast buffet greeted us each morning with breads, salads, fish, sauces, fresh vegetables, cold cucumber and hot cucumber dishes. The bread was most noteworthy: familiar brown, wheat, sourdough and raisin as well as vegetable bread, bread in loaves, bread in pudding, bread circles, bread rolls, and bread pastries. Two full-length tables dedicated to bread. I looked forward to the assortment of bread and like a good Swede ate fish for breakfast every morning.

We abandoned our plan of flying to Turkey for the weekend in favor of spending two extra days in Israel to visit Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho, the West Bank, the River Jordan and the Dead Sea.

At work, discussions of stock price and quarterly report dominated conversation. “How can you sit around and talk stock price with all the history surrounding us to think about? Wait a second, how much did you say the stock price rose? I see, in that case I can eat my soup dinners with a silver spoon!” Still, I was short with my co-workers. Anything aligning outside of my plans set me off that morning so I followed the golden rule: if you don't have anything nice to say, go sit by yourself in a traveler's workstation. I left the conference room set aside for visiting employees and finished my day in a cubical.

We left Haifa that evening to drive by the hill of Megiddo en route to Jerusalem. On the ride down I began to map out the possibilities for the weekend. ”Adam, I know we talked about spending extra time in Israel, but Jordan and Syria aren't that far away.” He suggested we proceed east. He even mentioned the possibility of reaching Iraq to see siblings he hadn't seen in thirty years.

The farther away from the coast we drove the more lush and green the landscape. We drove through valleys of farmland along a highway that continued into a town called Tulkarm. Adam recognized the name Tulkarm from his study of the Middle East conflict he had been doing by watching CNN. We suspected a militarized zone neared as more and more soldier-operated vehicles shared the road. The highway slowed to lighted intersections where armed soldiers and Israeli police directed traffic. We continued through intersections until the highway ended in a barricade.