Day 21 - Mt. Nebo and the Dead Sea Marriot

(The pool at our hotel)

(sunset over the dead sea)

Here is my post from last night. I actually fell asleep before I could get it posted. It's a short post, yesterday was pretty light (which was nice). We're off to Petra here pretty quickly, which should be a fun day.Well I finally made it to Jordan. While I understand the security stuff in Israel, it was nice to make it through visa and customs stuff in less than fifteen minutes.

When I bought my visa, the guy told me to go over and line up in line one. Who was line one for? VIP’s and Investors. Sometimes the American passport is really nice.

Dad got there to pick me up right as I walked through, so the timing was perfect.

The hotel was about 45 minutes from the airport but we made a little detour on our way to go see Mt. Nebo. Mt. Nebo was the place where God took Moses to look out over the promised land before he died, and then where he was buried. It was a little hazy today so we couldn’t quite see all the way across the Jordan rift valley, but we could see a good portion of the rift valley and Dad was really excited to see Jericho.

(The view from the top of Mt. Nebo, I'm guessing it was a little bit clearer when Moses was up here.)

After that we were going to go look at the Bethany beyond the Jordan site that some people think that Jesus was baptized in, but there is really no way of knowing exactly where that spot was. We actually drove up there, but the whole thing felt too much like a Egyptian tourist trap (even though we were in Jordan). A guy came up to us and told us that we had to take a shuttle to the site, that we couldn’t walk. He told us that he would be our guide, that the tour would take an hour and that the next shuttle would be there to get us in half an hour. The prospect of spending the next hour and a half at the mercy of our self appointed tour guide pretty much decided it for us so we turned around and left.

Then it was on to the Marriot at the Dead Sea. Once we got here our day pretty much ended. I won’t bore you with the details, but it mostly involved really good food, naps and sitting out on the patio looking at the sunset and then lightning storm (it actually rained a little bit.) Tomorrow we are headed off to Petra, which will take up pretty much the whole day (it’s a pretty long drive). Until then, thanks for reading.