Category: Jordan

A photo gallery of my trip to Jordan in 2005 is available by clicking here.

We leave the Dead Sea area at 6:30 AM this morning for the final day of our visit, returning to Amman and the Regency Palace Hotel for our last overnight. In the morning we visit the Schneller School, an elementary school and vocation training center for Jordanian boys operated by the Anglican Church, and directed…

This morning we left our Dead Sea Spa hotel for a visit to the Jordan River and the purported baptismal site of Jesus by John. The weather here is noticeably warmer and more humid, owing in part to our location at the lowest point on the earth (approximately 1,300 feet below sea level). There are…

This morning we are free in Aqaba to do as we wish. Some of the more adventurous in the group take a shuttle to the Royal Dive Center for a session of scuba diving and snorkeling , exploring the marvelous reefs and coral in the Gulf of Aqaba. The rest of us “veggie types” (me…

 This morning we boarded our time machine again, to visit yet another epoch. On Saturday we visited 1-50 AD at Herod’s castle, and then leaped forward 1,100 years to arrive at Karak castle. On Sunday we zipped back to 400 BC to survey the Nabatean civilization at Petra. We really cranked up the time machine…

God created the heavens and the earth, and all that dwell therein, and it was good. The Nabateans, however, are a close second. Working over two thousand years ago, this industrious tribe built Petra on what was already present in their land, fashioning the available landscape of canyons and ravines into a marvelous complex of…

Today we began our “loop trip” through the south of Jordan, a five day jaunt that will bring us back to Amman on Thursday night, in preparation for our Friday morning flight home. Our first stop today was the town of Mukawir, the site of Herod’s “summer castle”. Approaching the castle is in itself a…

Today our journey took us south from Amman about twenty miles, to Mount Nebo and the town of Madaba. We passed through gently rolling terrain, gradually climbing to a height of about 2,500 feet as we reached the top of Mount Nebo. This is the location from where it is said that God finally showed…

Today we visited historic sites in the northern portion of Jordan, in an area which in our Old Testament readings is known as Gilead. The area has been populated for centuries, due to the availability of fertile land and reasonable amounts of water. Our first destination is Umm Qeis, a historic site about twenty miles…

As we gather in the departure lounge in preparation for boarding our Royal Jordanian Airways flight, a sense of the “familiar” begins to gradually melt away. Strange accents, different facial features, headscarves on many of the women, kafirs on the some of the men, a smattering of Sikh turbans, the occasional thobe. Writing begins to…