Back To Jordan

Up early for the hotel shuttle out to the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The hotel was billed as an airport hotel, but it was really nowhere near the actual airport - it's just the closest one. However, it beats traveling all the way from Jerusalem in the dark.

Security was certainly the tightest we've been through. They actually grilled everybody in the line about where they had been, what they had seen in each country, why they had come, why does our ticket say Dubai but we don't have a stamp, what is your relationship to the person traveling with you. All that just to get out of the country. None of that stuff was needed to get in. Full x-ray of all luggage, not a dinky little check like in most countries, and half the bags seemed to get opened for a search anyway.

Some time at the gate waiting for our Royal Jordanian flight to Jordan, and another little low altitude hop of 20 minutes in an Embraer, but by now we knew the drill - take your box of juice when you get on, and wave to the farmers below.

Jordan was a pain. Even though we had a visa to originally enter the country, and we were only arriving to pick up our baggage off the carousel and then take another onward flight, we still had to get local money out of an ATM and buy two visas. A very expensive transit. However, that made lunch cheap. Back to $5 meals. Can't get a bottle of water for $5 in Israel. Amman is a nice airport, though very small, so there's no variety of shops - one of everything, so you exhaust the things to do very quickly. At least they had free wifi.

Late afternoon, after a 6 1/2 hour transit, we boarded our Emirates flight to Dubai. Luckily we could check our baggage all the way through. A Boeing 777. Took about 3 hours, and we got in about supper time. Then we had another layover of 5 1/2 hours, but this time we were in transit in a big airport so there was more variety. Walked laps of terminal A for a while, then for variety we took the train to terminal B, and walked laps of that too. Bought an ice cream to relieve the boredom, and finally curled up near the gate and had a nap.