So we left the fat, lazy, over-eating, ice-cream-laden world of Tel Aviv’s most gorgeous seaside resort and headed north. By Northeast. And now we’re in the Golan Heights. Its spectacularly beautiful, but we know that, we’ve been here before. We’re about 2 miles from Syria but we’ve never been there before. And as its all bad news there, we’re not going now. Also, if we take the Israeli rental car into such places, it will spontaneously explode. Because there are very strict rules when they hand over the keys.

What happened last time we came to this kibbutz was: I looked up on the map where to go, wrote down the names and numbers of all the roads, got in the car and drove here.

But I’m soooooo beyond that. Who even knows what a ‘map’ is any longer? This time I used… Waze. Which I use a lot. And I first used here in Israel, when it first started before it became totally ‘everywhere in the world’ and then sold to Google. And I have absolute faith in Waze. Whatever it says, I go.

And I would go north up the coast road; the ‘2’ road. But because of some local roadworks, Waze took me further east. Ah, we’ll take the ‘20’, another road I know. But no, we went past that and onto… the ‘6’!!! Firstly, that’s a toll road, and they’re always an issue in rental cars because about 4 months after traveling on one you get a bill for ‘toll charge, $2.25, admin fee: $49.50’. But that wasn’t our main concern. We were worried that the 6 road lies fairly east. And may possibly even be in the West Bank. And the West Bank is, from a Hertz/Budget/Avis point of view, worse than going to Syria. They fine you just for being there. And being an electronic toll road, they would know.

I didn’t know if I was in the West Bank or not. I didn’t have a map. So I turned off and headed back to the 2 road. Which took about 30 added minutes and could have affected our strict timetable for over-eating.

So I still adhere to the ‘In Waze we trust’ maxim which is tattooed on my chest.

And it was my birthday. A very lovely one. Driving worries aside.

A xxxx