Today is our last day in Jordan. We started the day by walking down to the Dead Sea. We didn’t have our bathing suits on so we just waded in the water. Unfortunately Rick slipped on some rocks, almost fell in, and cut his foot. The lifeguard had a first aid kit and got him all patched up. Not surprisingly the water felt very salty, almost oily. There were people in the water and you could see that they were very buoyant.
Mustafa picked us up at 11 because we had a number of stops. We started off by going to Bethany Beyond the Jordan which is the site where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. It is right on the border with Israel. The rope you see in the picture is the border. There were a lot more people on the Israeli side, with some people getting baptized. I put my feet in but I didn’t go all the way in; the water was very, very muddy.
Then we went to Mt Nebo, the place where Moses was granted a view of the Promised Land before he died. Unfortunately it was pretty foggy so we couldn’t really see Israel. There was a church with beautiful mosaic floors.
Our last stop was Madaba, a town close to the baptism site and Mt Nebo that is famous for it churches which contain Byzantine and Umayyad mosaics. We visited the Burnt Palace, Martyrs Church, and Saint George Greek Orthodox Church, which houses the floor map called the Madaba map. Here are some pictures.
After going to three churches we headed back to Amman. Our flight left at 2:30am so we had a hotel room until then. We said good bye to Mustafa. Here’s a selfie of us.
We got checked into our hotel, went to the grocery to get some dinner and just hung out in the room until midnight when we were picked up to go to the airport. We managed to stay up until the flight and then got some sleep on the flight to Frankfurt. An interesting thing happened in Frankfurt, they tested my knitting bag for explosives and it came back positive. Yikes!!! The security agent said they get a lot of false positives. The police interviewed me and let me proceed when they saw how innocent I am ;-). The flight from Frankfurt was uneventful and sleepless. We are still recovering from the jet lag.