Leaving Chicago| Jordan, Day 1

Day 1 - Monday, October 2, 2023

In the spring, we had booked a trip to Jordan to celebrate our 15-year anniversary this year, and the long-awaited day had finally arrived for us to begin our trip. To be honest, I am very out of practice with traveling at this point as our last international flight was to South Africa 5 YEARS AGO. To ease back into travel, we decided to do a group tour so that the entire travel package was arranged for us. We booked a tour called Wonders of the Hashemite Kingdom through a company called Exoticca. Even though this was supposed to be an "easy" trip, we had a few concerns as the day was drawing near. We inquired about cancellation a couple of times as maybe this wasn't the best timing for this kind of trip, but from what we could understand of Exoticca's travel policy, we would be out thousands of dollars.

The country of Jordan's official name is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and it is located in West Asia. The term Hashemite refers to a member of an Arab princely family that claims descent from Hashim, the great-grandfather of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The Hashemites have ruled over several kingdoms, including Jordan since 1921.

We were flying out of O'Hare on a Monday night at 8:20 PM. The timing was nice in that we didn't have any rush to be anywhere, but it also was a bit annoying in that we couldn't relax until we got to the airport and got this trip going already. Traffic wasn't too bad for the first part of the trip, but the last 17 miles were very slow-going with rush-hour traffic. In the future, we might consider public transportation, but we decided to just bite the bullet and pay the extortionate self-parking fees. We hopped on the shuttle bus, which takes us to the connecting tram at the airport. We got checked in and then went through security.

For whatever reason, all of the restaurants we were interested in eating at at the airport were basically out of food, so we ended up with a sad, soggy wrap from Protein Bar & Kitchen shortly before our flight started boarding.

We had booked what we thought were two seats on their own as that is what is clearly pictured on the Royal Jordanian Seat Map, but we arrived to find that row 34 was indeed made up of 3 seats, and there was a man sitting in the middle seat. He quickly got up so we could take our seats, and we proceeded to scramble for the seat map we had relied upon to better understand why our seats ended up not being the two-person row we were looking forward to. Very frustrating as we might have chosen different seats otherwise.

As I expected, dinner was served shortly after takeoff. Our life hack of ordering a vegetarian meal paid off as we were served long before everyone else around us. Unfortunately, nothing was terribly tasty, and it seemed that they largely took vegetarian to mean healthy as Francisco was eyeballing everyone else's more substantial desserts around us.

I watched an episode of Young Sheldon and started listening to an audiobook called You Won't Believe Me. Mostly I just tried to rest/sleep using a pair of noise canceling headphones, but they honestly just kind of hurt my hair and my ear. With all the resting I was doing, I do feel like the 11 1/2 hour flight went by surprisingly quickly.