Jordan and Israel 2015

Jim had arranged for breakfast to be served half an hour early this morning so that the twenty of us who chose to follow him on a hike up to Petra’s “high place” to see the sunrise would not have to do so on empty stomachs. However, the evening staff...

Today we visited Petra, capital city of the Nabataeans, an ancient people who roamed the Middle East for hundreds of years before settling in the Shara mountains east of the Dead Sea in the fourth century BC. They thrived as traders for several centuries, avoiding conquest by every other power...

We thought we would be angry when the scheduled wake up call came at 6:30 this morning. It turned out that we were awake before 6. And as it turned out, we needed the extra time and could have used several more minutes because we were the last ones on...

The centerpiece of the first few days of our trip is a visit to Petra, a city in what is now southern Jordan that was literally carved out of solid rock by the Nabataeans about two thousand years ago. The place was abandoned after a massive earthquake in 749 AD...

Last week, when Nancy told her Sunday School class (ages 16-18) that they would have a substitute teacher for the next two weeks because she was going to Israel, one of her students came up afterward and asked, “Why are you going to Israel?” The girl’s emphasis on the first...