Before getting to the prime attraction at Banais Falls in the Hermon Nature Reserve, we just by accident noticed a delightful but unheralded waterfall (Sa'ar) on the way to the Reserve. The celebrated Banais Falls, the highest one in Israel, was impressive but we had a hard time getting to it because of rowdy groups of teenagers blocking our way, and by their equally obstreperous adult guides made a lot of the walk unpleasant.

Later on the day, we sought refuge in a well-known nut and dried fruit store in Tiberias. After stocking up on some of these delectables, we headed for the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. The exterior was fairly austere, even ascetic, but the interior was much more colorful with its pastel paintings of saints.

Our GPS Has a Mind of its Own

The spelling of towns and attractions in the Israel-based GPS sometimes doesn’t coincide with how those areas are normally denoted in the tour books or even in local maps. It took my wife and me hours to locate a nearby national park because the GPS was useless. According to it, Hamat Tiberias didn’t exist: but as we later learned, the GPS would have gotten us there promptly if we had known that it decided to add another letter to the first word—Hamat became Khamat. Another time, we had to rely on an exceptionally detailed map instead of the GPS in order to locate a town called Banias because the idiosyncratic GPS couldn’t find the place. It turned out that if we had added another s to Banias, then the GPS would have accommodated us. As the lord of the highway coordinates in the sky, the GPS giveth extra letters and taketh away our sanity.