Often, when I return from a trip, I get so wrapped up in the mundane and so dismally struck with the everyday, it is almost impossible to write about what I saw, what I did, what I enjoyed during a perfectly awesome overseas adventure.

This is one of those times.

I have been trying to tell people about it, but I get kind of wistfully nostalgic, like I should be eight months or a year from now. Unfortunately for me, that feeling set in the minute I disembarked in Atlanta, and quite possibly the minute I went through passport control in Tel Aviv. Such a finality... ugh.

Spending two weeks schlepping buckets of dirt and rocks, moving endless wheelbarrows full of rocks, sifting hundreds of batches of 1st century rubble... you would think I would have been done with it. Over it. Dreaming of iced coffees and Steve Colbert reruns. Nope. I met, to be horribly cliche, some of the the most amazing people; spent so much time with old friends, relaxed and huffed it, hiked and swam, drank and ate and watched some sunsets over the Sea of Galilee, cicadas twerping and the heat waning softly.

I also found a first century Roman Provincial coin that dated the floor my co-digger and I spent eight days unearthing. It looked like a slim, filthy disc of nothing. Just so happened that a coin specialist from the Israeli Antiquities Authority was at the dig that day and tentatively dated it for me.

Saw Akko, Zefat, Hazor, Masada, Tiberias... flayed my poor skin alive in the Dead Sea. Ate and ate and ate and ate... the kibbutz food seemed cleansing, detoxing. Didn't have a shred of meat, there was so much else to eat. Moonlight swims in the Galilee, everyone rocketing off of the dock- new friends, found old ones.

More later...