This was the most rushed we've been to leave on a trip. Heather had an appointment at 10am with her back specialist to see if she could get clearance to dive. Heather has a couple partially ruptured disks in her back and the water pressure from diving can be very dangerous to ruptured disks. Unfortunately the advice was that the risk is too great, so diving is off the list. That took a couple hours out of the morning, which left us rushed to leave. Poor Craig, who drove us to the airport, had to wait 40 minutes for us while we finished packing.
The Air France flight was full to Paris. The line up to check in had a lot of people but it moved fairly quickly, it only took us about 20 minutes to get through to the gate.
I had made sandwiches for dinner, which we ate before boarding. That was a mistake because Air France had pretty decent food, and lots of it.
There was also too much on-board entertainment -- it almost seemed like the seven hour flight wouldn't be enough time to read our books, watch movies, listen to new CDs and read the in-flight magazine. I watched The Bourne Legacy (pretty good) and Prometheus (not so good).
We arrived at 7am in Paris. The wine and cognac with dinner had left me a little worse for the wear. As we deplaned, I heard someone call my name, which I ignored because I wasn't expecting anyone to know me in Charles de Gaulle. But it turned out my cousin Tyron had been on the same flight, he on his way to Mumbai! We chatted for a bit. His connecting flight left shortly so we parted after getting through security.
Heather and I had six hours to wait. After freshening up (a bit more planning required post 911 to take airplane sized toothpaste, mouthwash and contact solution), we found some really comfortable lounge seats at the very ends of the terminal. They're hidden from view until you're right up on them, so most passengers weren't aware they were there. We napped for a bit.
The flight to Amman was on a smaller A320 and the seats were more squished. We slept on-and-off on the 4.5 hour flight, in between eating another good meal from Air France. There was a bit of turbulence, but nothing too bad.
On arrival in Amman, we easily withdrew Jordanian Dinars (JD) from an ATM, paid our 20JD fee for the visa, and got our passports stamped. The immigration officials were very friendly, only asking which hotel we were staying at in Jordan (and also where I was from originally, out of curiosity).
Next was picking up our luggage which was already off the conveyor so Heather didn't have time to get worried (she has a long history of lost luggage). I had arranged with the hotel for a pickup from the airport, but we didn't see anyone with our names so we took a taxi from outside the terminal. Heather and I are now 0-4 for airport pickups on our last four trips.
We reached the hotel around 9pm, about 20 hours door-to-door from home. We're staying at the Hishamm hotel, a self-described "boutique style" hotel. As a boutique hotel, it has the requisite popular bar and restaurant on the ground floor. We cleaned up and went downstairs for dinner. The food was yummy (although the Arabic food was listed on the back pages, behind the western food). We also had a local draft beer, which at 7JD was the same price as the main. Smoking is allowed in bars and restaurants, to which we'll need to adjust. It's hard to believe it wasn't that long ago that that was the norm in Toronto.
We crashed pretty quickly after dinner in a very comfortable king sized bed.
This morning I was up at 5am, which isn't too bad for jet lag. The room is pretty quiet so I could just barely hear the call to prayers. Heather noticed a sticker on the ceiling which we couldn't figure out until Heather noticed it pointed the direction to Mecca.
Today we're headed south to see a couple ruins along the way to Petra.
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