King's Highway Tour, Chunk #2

First, an aside: A cool shower, however brief, refreshes. Slightly wet feet dried by a standing fan, feel almost dance-ready.

Continuing our Saturday tour is a rather like a good theatre production; the second bit it is much shorter than the first and contains a highlight. After traipsing around Herod's fortress, we lunched on a shady veranda. Then we drove yet on to see another archeological site, Al-Lahun, dating to the same period as Umayri. This site perched on the edge of the Jordanian Rift Valley with a dammed wadi in the valley below. Finally, we wrapped up our tour with a stop at Umm Ar-Rasas, a Byzantine site with stunning mosaic floors in side-by-side sanctuaries from different eras. We all gazed at the pictures of the cities of the Decopolis, repeated tree of life motifs, fishermen (once naked, now scrambled, perhaps by iconoclasts, perhaps by Ottomen), animals, grapes, etc. all now protected from the elements and made accessible by raised walkways. A sense of awe came over us in this holy site. Beyond the churches, sprawling ruins made us curse our weariness and the shortness of the stop. There was so much to see and 45 minutes just wouldn't do. Sigh. Ken and I agreed that the Byzantine era is something of a favorite for us. (We also enjoyed the so-new-it's-not-yet-open visitors center at Umm Ar-Rasas. Open for us, but not yet selling tickets! It was nice to end the day with sparkling public restrooms. In that sense we lucked out all day with lux facilities at each of our stops. The small things really do matter.)


Pictures of July 4th in Madaba coming soon. We splurged for the holiday with...well, check back and see.