DAY 1 Long Bus Rides and SNOW!

It’s been awhile since I last updated with a four-day trip to Jordan and a fantastic day at Tel Aviv yesterday that exhausted me completely. It was like Egypt all over again! Our trip to Jordan was incredible and too short if you ask me, but we visited some amazing places and I had a wonderful time. I was healthy and well the whole time which was a blessing so let me dive into all my happenings. We left Monday morning at 7:00am sharp with enthusiastic excitement for our adventure away from home when only 15 minutes into it, we were all sound asleep (at least I was). Our first stop was Mount Nebo where it is believed by most scholars that Moses stood atop to visualize the Promised Land and where he was supposedly buried. We know from the Joseph Smith Translation and from the Book of Mormon (specifically the book of Alma) that Moses was translated. It was super cold and windy there so it was a quick stop as we moved on to the city of Madaba where an important Byzantine map of the entire Holy Land was depicted on the mosaic floor at the St. George Church. Historians have used this exact drawing to reconstruct the Byzantine Near East, including the Galilee, the Jordan River Valley, the coastal plains, the city of Jerusalem, and Egypt. Then it was off to Petra where snow covered the grassy hills on our drive to the Petra Palace Hotel. It didn’t quite hit me until the white fluff disappeared, that it had actually snowed so even though I’m not in freezing cold Provo right now, the snow still followed me to the Middle East. Since we only had one night to spend in Petra, all of us princesses and princes (referring to the hotel name if you didn’t catch my lame joke), we had a night out in the extremely quiet and mellow streets searching long and hard for a certain hotel with “THE BEST ICE CREAM IN ALL OF ASIA” (FYI...Jordan is in Asia). It wasn’t all that miraculous but we made the most of it. That concludes day 1 of JORDAN. Next...PETRA and HOW DOES IT RELATE TO INDIANA JONES?