Kingdom of Jordan with Babb - Oct 2012
In October of 2012, Larry Rexford, Bruce Babb and I flew from DFW to London Heathrow and then on to Amman, Jordan for a second visit with the Royal Jordanian Air Force. While we were in Jordan, we again worked with our Jordanian rep, Imad Matarneh and with Alan Threadgould from the RC Dubai office. This was a very short trip, we left on a Monday, arrived 1 AM Wednesday morning, met with RJAF on Wednesday and went home on Friday morning.
On Thursday, we got emails from the US Embassy warning of a planned protest and burning of the American flag the next day (Friday) in front of the US Embassy. This was happening while Syria next door is killing its own people, some terrorists were captured in Jordan coming out of Syria and just after the US Ambassador to Libya was killed in a riot/attack in Benghazi, Libya. We left early Friday morning and missed the protest.
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Larry, Bruce and Alan Threadgould in hotel lobby in Amman.
Driving to RJAF headquarters through the streets of Amman
We got a chance to do some sightseeing in Jordan. We were too late to go to Petra so we hired a driver who did not speak much English to take us to some other hot tourist spots such as Madaba, Mt. Nebo, the Baptism Site and the Dead Sea.
I just had to ask our driver if he smoked Camels and he laughed so I think he understood more than he let on.
From Mt. Nebo, you can see dry desert and Jordan River valley is green
This is the site where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. It is on the Jordan river, which was not too big and divides Israel and Jordan. The river moved several hundred feet away so baptism site is now dry.
Next stop was to see the Dead Sea. I hadn’t planned on swimming in the Dead Sea, but I figured we might not get a chance to be here again. We bought swim suits from a guy with car parked on the side of the road for 4 dinars, changed and put our clothes, wallets, cameras and passports into a white trash bag that we dropped on the beach. Who says American tourists don’t have any class?
The Dead Sea was very salty, you do not want to get that in your mouth or in your eyes. We could float on the water, could not go under. It was fun. There were about 100 people at the beach, including several people who were covered with black mud and some girls in burkas who had to swim in long sleeve track suits.
This was our ticket to swim at the beach on hotel property. It had enough bad English that I had to take a photo, it was pretty funny, you can see across the Dead Sea to Israel, I think it is smaller than Lake Texoma. I was glad that we stopped and went swimming, that is not something you get a chance to do very often. It took a soak in a pool and a shower to get the salt off of my skin
