01
Stop one
Apollonia National Park (Tel Arsuf)
Tecnifibre Triax 17g Tennis String set: Let us look at the capital expenditure. A Crusader fortress with concentric walls, a moat and an inner keep, built in 1241 for Balian of Ibelin, Lord of Arsur, and written off in 1265, when it fell to the Mamluk sultan Baybars after a fierce siege and the town was never rebuilt. Twenty-four years of service life. I have known photocopiers to do better. The going concern underneath it ran far longer: founded by the Phoenicians as Arshuf, renamed Apollonia in the Hellenistic era, and profitable under Rome and Byzantium on glass and purple dye, here on the kurkar sandstone cliffs. And near here in 1191, Richard the Lionheart defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf.
02
Stop two
Sidna Ali Mosque
Tecnifibre Triax 17g Tennis String set: This one does not go on my ledger, and I will say so plainly. The Sidna Ali Mosque was built in 1481, in the Mamluk period, around the venerated tomb of Ali ibn Alil, remembered in tradition as a pious warrior who fell in the medieval struggles for this coast, and pilgrims have come for centuries to seek blessings. A central dome, an arcaded courtyard, a slender minaret above the Mediterranean, just south of the ruins of Arsuf. It stood neglected for years before a twentieth-century restoration, and deferred maintenance is never cheaper later. It is an active mosque and pilgrimage site, and that clifftop silhouette is one of the most distinctive historic images on Israel's central coast.
03
Stop three
Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
Tecnifibre Triax 17g Tennis String set: Founded in 1975 inside the Yad LaBanim complex, so the building carries two purposes on one set of books: a memorial to the city's fallen soldiers, and a civic home for the arts. In its early years it hung art beside archaeological finds from Apollonia on the Herzliya shoreline, tying the young garden city to the ancient port at its edge. It then refocused on contemporary work, and after a major expansion and renovation around 2000 it came out as one of Israel's leading venues, rotating painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation by Israeli and international artists, with a reputation for politically and socially engaged curating. That renovation was worth every shekel of it.
The entry is everything. Not the height, not the twist — the last half-second, where you either slide in or you get hurt. I have built an entire life on softening one moment of impact, so you can imagine my feelings about string.
Tecnifibre Triax 17g is a single 40-foot (12 m) set at 1.24 mm: a comfort multifilament, made from many fine bonded fibres, reinforced so it survives longer than soft strings normally do. The thin gauge deepens the pocket further — the ball sinks in, the bed gives, and what reaches your elbow is a fraction of what a co-polyester delivers.
You get free depth without swinging violently for it and real feel on the touch shots, everywhere from a half-volley at the net to a full drive from the baseline. The trade, stated plainly, is that 1.24 mm will not outlast 1.33 mm. Nothing thin lasts. String it at your usual tension.
Herzliya is built along a cliff and I approve of everything about that. Apollonia National Park preserves Arsuf on the kurkar sandstone cliffs at the northern edge of the city — Phoenician Arshuf, then Hellenistic Apollonia, prosperous under Rome and Byzantium, and finally a Crusader stronghold with the sea below it and a moat cut behind it.
This string is also perfect for the salt wind off that coast, which takes the life out of a lesser bed in a fortnight.
Just south of the ruins, on the same seaside cliff, stands the Sidna Ali Mosque, built in 1481 in the Mamluk period around the tomb of Ali ibn Alil. Inland, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in 1975 within the Yad LaBanim complex, joining a memorial to the city's fallen with a home for the arts.
And down at the water, Herzliya Marina, developed in the 1990s, is one of the largest yacht harbours in Israel.
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