Show and Tell: The Acacia Tree

For show and tell this week, I'm bring a photo of this tree. It's nice, isn't it?

I took this picture when we were driving in the Negev Desert. I liked the way the tree was growing all by itself, with almost nothing else growing near by.

There is, of course, a story to this tree. We decided to take a slight detour from the main road, to "quickly" see what's called the small and large "machtesh". Huge craters, which I admit, were really cool. What was not cool was the drive took much longer than we planned, and we almost got stuck on these scary roads after sunset.


You cannot tell from this picture how frightening the roads are, because this was taken at the top of one of the mountains, on a flat bit.

Here are what the roads looked like:

Notice how steep the hill is, how quick the turns are, how there are NO guard rails, certainly no lights, and nothing for miles and miles. There is enough room for a car and a half, but the roads are two way. We almost ran right into a car coming down the hill, and had to squeeze by each other. I covered my eyes the entire time, making all kinds of nervous, squeaky noises, whispering, "Please don't let us die, please don't let us die."

You can see why we wanted to get off these roads before the sun went down!

When we were at the top of the mountain, we went hiking to see one of the craters. It took longer than we expected, but I'll save that story and the picture for another time. Eventually, we were back in the car, realizing how little time we had before the sun set.

Then, when we came across that tree, I told my husband, "Oh, pull over! I want to take a picture."

"Are you crazy? The sun is going down, and we still need to go back down on the other side."

"I know, I know... but, I just like that tree. I'll be quick."

He pulled over, I jumped out of the car, snapped the picture, and we were back on our way.