Having traveled as much as I have and never having an issue of any kind, I was not prepared for the plane ride that I received.  Of course it started out normal . . . well normal maybe a bit of a stretch.

Annette and I were not seated together on the plane.  We are big girls and were fine with that knowing that we would be either reading or sleeping most of the flight anyway, it just didn’t matter who was sitting next to us.  However upon boarding the little old lady sitting next to me was frantic that she wasn’t sitting by her friend.  As luck has it, her friend was actually sitting next to Annette so I graciously gave up my aisle seat and sat in the middle with Annette on my left and what would soon become my new fast friend on my right.

I spent the next two straight hours chatting with the gentleman to my right.  He was from Jordan and was currently living in New York but going back home to visit his mom.  He told me all that was wonderful about where I was going and the places that I really shouldn’t miss visiting while over in his country.  Then the personal questions started coming which I tried politely to side step as much as possible.  Regardless his personal space slowly started to disappear and invade mine.  He suddenly couldn’t talk to me without having a hand on my knee or arm or hand.  His shoulder was casually resting on mine.  All I have to say is that it is a really good thing that I don’t have much of a personal space bubble or it would have been miserable.  Luckily he finally got tired and decided to go to sleep.

Right around that time my stomach started not to feel so grand.  I told myself that it was nothing and went to sleep.  About an hour and half later I woke up really not feeling well and feeling extremely trapped in a very small space.  I made it about another hour or so before I couldn’t hold onto my dinner any longer and I was miserable.  Never before have I needed one and the only time that I did . . . not a bag to throw up anywhere to be found and everyone sleeping around me.  The plastic bag taken off the blanket the airline provided would just have to work. 

So it was only six hours into a twelve hour flight and I was not a happy camper and I was just feeling more and more miserable.  Not a good thing to start watching the time ticking down when there are still six hours left.  It makes for a very long flight.  After a while I still wasn’t feeling well at all.  My mind started swimming and tears started forming because all I wanted was off that plane and in a bed.  It took me some time before I realized that I had a whole plane full of priesthood holders.  Ever ask a stranger for a blessing in a plane?  I can now say that I have.

About an hour before the plane landed and way too many trips to the bathroom later (sorry Annette for climbing over you so much), I started to feel better.  The gentleman sitting on my right finally decided to come out of his sleep and immediately the chatting started up again.  As we were sitting waiting to exit the plane he handed me a wad of money.  Not US dollars but money I didn’t recognize.  He told me it was Egyptian money.  So I did what I thought he wanted and looked at it and said it was cool and attempted to hand it back to him.  He would have none of that.  It was a gift he said and I needed to keep it so I could buy something in Egypt.  He told me that the 30 pounds that I had in my hands wasn’t much anyway and that he wouldn’t accept it back.  At that point I didn’t want to be rude and really couldn’t think of how to politely force him to take it back, so I just said thank you.  Not even 24-hours into the trip and strange men were handing me cash, oh if I had only realized that this would be the beginning of a hilarious tale. 

It wasn’t until we were waiting to collect the luggage that Annette admitted that she wasn’t feeling all that well either.  As we discussed it, the conclusion that we came to was that eating clam chowder in New York had given us a bit of food poisoning.  I discovered that the worse place to have food poisoning is 35,000 feet in the air, stuck in the middle seat on a twelve hour flight with everyone sleeping.  Something that I hope nobody else ever has to experience. 

We arrived in Amman, Jordan at 4:45 pm their time and immediately handed over our passports and went to collect our color coded luggage.  Color coded?  The tour company had assigned us to one of two buses . . . it was either red or yellow.  Somehow they just knew that I wouldn’t be happy on any color but red and had been so assigned.  I quickly learned that the red bus was the fun bus and I would come to love so many new friends on that bus. 

We finally got to our hotel and checked in and called it a night.

**This is the last post that is going to give you a daily run down.  If you want a day by day, you will just have to come and visit me as I have typed up everything that happened each day and will be putting with the pictures that go along with it.  Instead on here I am going to break it down into sections of happenings so that I can record it on a different level than I did with my pictures or in my personal journal.  I am hoping that the three different perspectives will somewhat do justice to the trip.