Four stops before the checkout

Acre, Israel

Stop one

Hospitaller Fortress (Knights' Halls)

Dunlop SX Team 260 Tennis Racquet: What preserves a thing better, care or burial? The Knights of St John built their headquarters here in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, dormitories, a refectory under mighty rib vaults, a hospital, a courtyard, a crypt, and ran charity and war out of the same address, which is a contradiction worth sitting with. Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291. The Ottomans then raised their citadel directly on top and entombed the halls in rubble, and it was the rubble that saved them: systematic excavation from the mid-twentieth century found the complex astonishingly intact. Buried, and therefore whole. The date I almost walked past: 1191, when Acre became capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Stop two

Al-Jazzar Mosque

Dunlop SX Team 260 Tennis Racquet: A building assembled out of older buildings; is it new? The materials came from the ruins of Caesarea and Atlit, and the mosque was raised in 1781 over Crusader-era vaults by Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, the Ottoman governor they called the Butcher, who rebuilt Acre as his walled capital and in 1799 withstood Napoleon Bonaparte's siege. It is the largest mosque in Israel outside Jerusalem. Around the arcaded courtyard stand a domed fountain, cells for scholars, and the tombs of al-Jazzar and his successor Suleiman Pasha, and a shrine within preserves what tradition holds to be hairs from the beard of the Prophet Muhammad. The green dome still rules the skyline. Nothing here belongs to only one age.

Stop three

Templars' Tunnel

Dunlop SX Team 260 Tennis Racquet: For seven hundred years this existed and nobody knew, which raises the only question that really matters: how much else is like that? Some 350 metres, cut in the Crusader period beneath what became the Pisan quarter, joining the Templar fortress on the south-western tip of the city to the port on the east. The lower section is hewn through natural rock, the upper roofed with a barrel vault of dressed stone, and it let the Templars move men and goods securely through the last Crusader century, before Acre fell in 1291. In 1994 a blocked drain led workers into the void beneath a house. Cleared and lit, it is now walked end to end, under the living city.

Stop four

Khan al-Umdan

Dunlop SX Team 260 Tennis Racquet: Some forty granite columns, carried here from the ancient ruins of Caesarea, hold up this courtyard and give the place its name, the Inn of the Columns. A column, note, has no opinion about which building it stands in. Built in 1784 beside the harbour in the reign of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar: merchants off the ships lodged in the upper gallery while their goods and animals filled the yard below, and the grain and cotton of Galilee moved to the Mediterranean through this one square. A clock tower was added over the northern gate in 1906 for the jubilee of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. It stands empty now inside the UNESCO old city. Emptiness is also a shape.

The Acre, Israel track

Dunlop SX Team 260 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Every racquet is a key, friend — the question is whether it fits the lock. I've cut keys for forty years, and the Dunlop SX Team 260 is a master key if I've ever filed one: a generous 105 square inch head, which is an oversized sweetspot, meaning the "hit it clean" tumbler basically springs itself.

Light 260 gram unstrung weight — turns smooth in any hand, no forcing, and forcing is how amateurs snap keys. Full 27 inch length, an open 16×19 string pattern for easy spin, and a forgiving, power-focused build that opens doors for improving players. You want my professional opinion? Most frames are cut too fine for beginners. This one fits the lock you actually own.

Now, Acre, Israel — the finest collection of locked doors in the Mediterranean, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Under the streets runs the Templars' Tunnel, some 350 metres of Crusader passage from the Templar fortress on the southwestern tip across to the port, its lower section hewn through natural rock and its upper part barrel-vaulted in dressed stone; it stayed sealed for seven hundred years, until 1994, when a blocked drain finally gave it up and a plumber, a brother of the trade, picked history's stubbornest lock.

Above it, the Hospitaller Fortress hides the vaulted Knights' Halls of the Latin Kingdom beneath the Ottoman city, and the Al-Jazzar Mosque of 1781 crowns the skyline over Crusader vaults.

It turns everywhere from a windy court on the Acre sea walls to an indoor hall in Haifa half an hour down the coast, and it never once binds.

It is also perfect for a slow hour in Khan al-Umdan, where some forty granite columns carried off from the ruins of Caesarea hold up the arcades — 260 grams is no weight at all to carry through a courtyard while your eyes are on the ceiling. Play a set by the sea walls, then go see what patience opens. And the hummus at the port? That, friend, needs no key at all.

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Dunlop SX Team 260 Tennis Racquet

Dunlop SX Team 260 Tennis Racquet