Leon Family Adventures: 2016

For Thankgsiving, we traded in our typical American tradition of turkey, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie, for a weekend exploring the most southern point of Israel... Eilat. This is also a common location to cross the border into Jordan to visit the ancient city of Petra. We drove down on Thursday, and on Friday my friend and I did a tour to Petra while the kids stayed in Eilat with the dads. When I was gone for the day, Manuel took them to Eilat's Coral World Underwater Observatory aquarium. I actually think Petra would have been a great place to explore with the kids, but way too much for them to do in one day. The previous post is of my day tour to Petra. In Eilat, we ate at some delicious restaurants and did some great hiking!

Saw a ton of these signs on our drive through the desert to Eilat. We did not see ONE camel!

We needed to take a break about 3 hours into the 4 hour drive. It was much needed, and a great break for the kids.

Saturday morning we ate breakfast at Cafe Cafe inside of Dan Hotel and then admired the beach for a few minutes.

We had the most amazing day hiking Red Canyon.

At this point we didn't realize how amazing and challenging the hike would become. Here we were, ten minutes in and they can't help but to climb everywhere!

Now it's really getting exciting!

Yes we walked through that!

There were about four of these metal ladders for areas that were extremely steep. The kids did so awesome and I'm so proud of them! They were nervous and excited, but took their time and were so proud of themselves!

Wow, intense! We walked all the way through the canyons that you see in this picture, with lots of jumping, climbing, ladders for the extremely steep parts (like in the previous picture), and then had to do some pretty insane maneuvering by holding onto metal handles that were on the side of the vertical rocks (did I say it was insane yet? I probably would've fallen to my death if I'd dared to take any pics, so no pics of that part) so that we could loop around and walk back. This picture is right after we did the hardest part of the hike. I am so proud that the kids gave it their all and conquered it, even though it was a bit nerve-wracking at times!