Huckabee first visited Israel when he was 17. After high school, he and a friend set out on what now seems to him a “pretty crazy” adventure for “an untraveled kid from Arkansas” — a monthlong trip that took him from Syria to Greece, with a week in Israel, which he found utterly “enchanting, inviting, mesmerizing and magnetic.”…

And he went down to the Jordan River, for a sight that, 37 years later, briefly left him mumbling like a 17-year-old again.

“We had stopped by to see where Jesus was baptized, and instead there were these great-looking Israeli girls in bikinis, just showing off and flirting,” he recalled.