Jordan Rocks, Part 10

I'm not really sure how to do this post. I took SO many pictures on our last full day in Jordan. We went to Jerash. It's the largest collection of Roman ruins outside of Italy. Our friends here in our country told us we had to go there. We knew it would be a hard day, walking around with Lucy and we were right. But man, it was worth it! It was beautiful! And amazing! Everything was so well preserved!

Jerash. It was one of the cities in the Decapolis. It's on the "Road to Damascus". Yes, friends. We were standing right in the middle of Biblical history. Pretty amazing stuff. Check out this website for more info on Jerash and this one is good, too.

 This is the initial gate as you walk into the site. It's called Hadrion's Arch, after the Emperor that visited the city.

Check out this mosaic floor that's STILL intact! 

 The next thing we came to was a hippodrome, where they'd have chariot races. It could seat 15,000 people.

 And here we all are at the South Gate to the ancient city. We had no idea how much of a walk was in front of us! The city just keeps going and going! It's really long and they haven't even excavated the whole thing!

 This was moments before Lucy started one of her "I'm 2.5 and I don't need a reason" meltdowns that lasted a good 30 minutes. Ah, the joys...

Our view of Jerash as we walked into the city. You should definitely click on this one to enlarge it and see just how many ruins you can see still remain!

 Brad did a manual panorama of this oval plaza. Wow. Have you ever seen so many columns standing in one place?

See Lucy in the bottom corner - in the midst of meltdown. 

 These columns are from Zeus' temple. 

 Now, my favorite part. 

Seriously, my favorite part. (Tears welled up. Yes, they did.)

A real, amazing, well-preserved Roman Amphitheater! 

It. Was. Awesome! 

The stage.

Greek carvings on the bottom row.

See the seat "numbers" on the fronts of the seats? COOL.

One of the corridors that go out into the amphitheater.

Looking straight up the stairs to my man! Very steep stairs!

 Seeing what it would be like to be a spectator on the top row.

  View from the top - 33 rows.

 Are you kidding me? It was AWESOME!

 View of the stage from the top row, stage R, audience L

 See the huge oval plaza in the distance? 

 Here we are! It was amazingly high and kinda scary to walk around on top.

 Pure joy. 

(They occasionally had a guy playing a drum and one who played the bagpipes to entertain the tourists) 

 Lucy wasn't happy, but I had enough for the both of us!

 The direct center spot of the orchestra. The acoustics were UNREAL! 

See the small circles/holes around the bottom? You could talk into one of those, very quietly, and be heard, perfectly, by putting your ear into one on the other side!

Man, it would have been SO cool to see a show here! And even cooler to be IN A SHOW here! 

And I bet that the whole city knew when a show was going on! 

(I've been sitting here for 10 minutes, just looking back at the pictures and reliving it all. It was seriously amazing!)

It's now 3 hours later and I'm able to continue... 

This is the main street. It's believed that this is part of the Roman Road that Saul was walking on when he had his vision of Jesus and then became known as Paul. Pretty cool, huh?

 It's quite an impressive stretch of long, straight, cobblestone road!

 Lined with columns

 And in places, you can see the indentations of chariot/wagon wheels! 

 These two are at one of the intersections.

 Me and my friend, Judy

 This was a fountain.

 See how detailed?

 This is Artemis' temple. The columns are massive!

 See? 

 Can you imagine how they did this? Bringing the materials to this place and then carving them and then stacking them? I cannot.

 Another view of the road from higher on the hill. And you can see that there's probably more underneath the ground where we were standing to take this picture. They haven't finished excavating this whole area. There are literally hundreds of stones all over the place that were probably pieces of houses and other buildings.

 Lucy and Brad and our friend David are in the center of this picture. They didn't make it all the way down where Judy and I went. But Lucy had a great time playing in the oval plaza!

 And here she is, running to "Mommy!"

 We found a staircase next to the main gate going down...

 Not sure what this was, maybe for animals?

 Waiting for our ride to pick us up. What a fun day!

 And of course, Lucy zonked out as soon as we got in the car!

And I know you'll find this hard to believe, but this was our last full day in Jordan! 

That night, we had kanafe, a traditional Jordanian dessert, at a famous place called Habibah. We'd been told about kanafe by several people and let me tell you, it was delicious! 

And finally, the next day, on the plane. Lucy got 2 puppets on this flight. I guess it's cause she's super cute! She had them both on her hands. They were "talking" to each other! Notice she has her headphones on, too! She's her daddy's girl!

Whew, what a journey it was and has been through the retelling of it on my blog! Hope you enjoyed it and got to live vicariously through us! You should go to Jordan when you can! It's a very cool place! (But come visit us, first!)