On the sixth day of our tour of Jordan and Egypt with Encounters Travel we flew from Amman to Cairo. Our flight was relatively short. It was totally uneventful until mid-flight when I realized that I had lost my phone! I was working on our taxes with my phone as we waited at the gate for our flight to depart. All of our financial information, online banking, credit card details, passwords, and every other piece of sensitive information that we store on our phones was now lost

Late in the afternoon, we left Petra and drove into the spectacular desert scenery of Wadi Rum, where friendly Bedouin hosts greeted us at a comfortable camp beneath the towering rocks and cliffs. Ol and I were determined to get back in the good grace of our guide, after ‘getting lost’ in Petra. We spent the evening and night relaxing at the camp, and enjoying a delicious traditional desert meal. I was surprised by the large size of the Bedouin camp. I was even more surprised

We began our day once again with no wake-up call, but thankfully both of our alarms went off as planned. I did not want to be late, we had an exciting day in Jordan planned. I’m not a big fan of organized tours, but our small group was great and I loved our tour! With the exception of the Aussie’s who stayed to themselves, and the Doctor from Canada, the rest of us were all Americans. We were all experienced travelers with the exception of four adventurous senior ladies from

“Jen, wake-up! It’s 8:10!” As Ol’s words sunk in, I bolted upright. Within seconds I was barking orders, “grab the phones, get dressed, we can get ready on the bus”. We were seriously late in joining our tour. We were supposed to meet our tour group at breakfast at 7:30 a.m. and the bus was to leave at 8:15 a.m. Thankfully we had showered the night before. As I looked for my clothes, I was thinking that in the worst case scenario we could take a taxi to join them at the first

My step dad Gary was an amateur archeologist. Our basement was so full of artifacts that it looked like it should have been Indiana Jones’ classroom. It was both cool and creepy and I was always afraid to go downstairs to do the laundry. It was when he would bring these treasures up from the dark and cover the dining room table that I would get interested in their history. Hours would pass as I held these early stone artifacts in my hand marveling at their fine craftsmanship

I ’m a voracious reader. I always have been. Maybe that’s why a trip to England was so extraordinary for me. To actually walk through so much of the history I have read about was amazing. To stand in front of my favorite author’s homes and to stand a top their graves in Westminster Abbey was surreal. Oliver and I had originally planned to visit England in May, but a certain Royal wedding changed our plans. We were going to do the famous trek across England, from Coast to Coa

In December, we flew from Portugal to Marrakech, Morocco for twelve days and stayed in a beautiful riad in the middle of one of the busiest marketplaces in the world. We used this as a base to explore Marrakech’s famous attractions. To get out of the craziness of the medina we also took several tours to explore the surrounding area. Just as I was ready to write about our fabulous trip to the Atlas Mountains, a terrorist attack happened in Imlil, the same village we had stayed