Sodom or bust

(Nageev desert, somewhere 40 miles east of Be'er Sheva and -500 ft. below sea level) - I feel like Hunter S. Thompson sending up a rooster tail of dust behind me as I fly through the dessert in my rental car just a touch too fast to be safe... only except that Dr. Gonzo is not beside me, I'm not jacked out on qualudes, and I'm 8000 miles east of Barstow, CA.

I'm here in Israel at the invitation of a collaborator at the Weizmann institute. I flew into Ben Gurion Monday, ran on the beach Tuesday morning from my hotel in Tel Aviv to Jaffa (where Jonah had that date with a hungry whale), and then spent the last two days in Rehovot talking to various people in the physics department there.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to bag the plan of traveling by bus for some post-work touristing and sacked up for a rental car to give me more mobiblity. I'm traveling 130km an hour on an local road through the south Israeli Nageev dessert and now loosing altitude rapidly on my way to the Dead Sea. Mountains lie in the distance and dull scrub plants are in the foreground. I could be outside Barstow. Every window is rolled down, Hebrew hip hop blasts from the radio as the hot dusty dessert wind swirls through the car and I fly past Bedouin camps, typing with one hand (and one eye) on my laptop and the other on the steering wheel and road ahead. When the muse calls it is best to listen. It's 90 degrees in the shade and only late April. My mind reels. The Dead Sea was like Oz to me. You couldn't get there from whereever I was. It wasn't a real place. In 30 minutes I'll be floating on my back on a salty lake at the lowest elevation on the planet - 1400 ft. below sea level. Then it is back on a highway through the West Bank and the night in Jerusalem's old town. I'll have a full day and evening in Jerusalem, before dumping the rental car back at Ben Gurion at 2:00 AM Saturday morning to make the 3 hour prior to flight security check in at 3:30 AM, a few hours on an airport couch and before making my 6:30 AM flight. And be back in Geneva by noon.