And the updates begin

Here I sit freezing cold and wet, my toes have lost feeling and all of my warm clothes are soaking wet. We have been in Jerusalem for three days now, it’s nearly ten in the morning and we have a day to just revel in our surroundings. This is the first day of rain and the rain here is so much like it is at home - buckets. I’m going to try my best and play by play each day but it is going to be difficult. It’s hard to update here because we only have very shotty internet down the street, but you have to use their computers and up until now we have had others in our room at the hostel, so to be on the safe side I have left my computer hidden. But now it is just us girls in our crazy little hostel (you’ll hear more about it soon). So I am sorry for the delays of days, I guess about a week now with no updates. So much has happened. I’m still trying to process it all.

So after our crazy trip into Jordan and our trip with the illegal driver.. which I have to elaborate on. So we get off the ferry and are haggling for a bit for a diver and we end up with this dude that puts us up in his pimped out suburban. When you haggle a car you are usually a tad unsure of what exact car they will end up taking you to, so when we saw this one we were all pretty shocked. There was no way we were going to be able to make all of our luggage fit -- but we did and we all somehow got in there too. We get in, totally cramped and just wanting this leg of the trip to be over, but we all know we still have a few hours in the car. We get to the check point and our driver and the police start yelling at each other. We have no idea what is going on but we know it is not good, especially when he drops the car in to reverse and we end up where we began. He say “ You sit be back five minutes.” Well okay what are we going to do buddy you have all of our luggage in your car and strapped to the roof. He gets back in and tells us to get out of the car. What? He ensure us it will be fine, just walk up the hill and meet him up at the top. We were all super confused but what else could we do, so we started the trek up the hill. So as we reach the top of the hill, the man zips by us and talks to the police. This time their conversation seems a lot calmer. The police hands our driver a piece of paper and than all of a sudden we hear -- faster faster, run, run, hurry, hurry. So that’s what we did and we jumped in the car and as soon as the last door was slammed shut he hit the pedal and we sped off. We were on the run. We were all laughing so hard at the situation. Than before we could fully understand what was going on he drives down this side road in purpose of veering from the police we saw ahead of us. Than from that side road he pulls into this chop shop looking place. We thought for sure he was going to be changing license plates or something but nope he is just siphoning gas from one car to our car. Are you kidding me? Ha this is nuts, plus he is standing there with all his buddies as they smoke their cigarettes next to the car tank. Yikes. Ha, the trip was nuts. I fell asleep at one point and in my dream we were in the car flying down the road over 100 mph with the same driver on our death wish but the thing is when I woke up I’m not too sure the story changed much. Before we hit our destination we stopped at a store on the side of the road and our driver would not let us pay. I was certain he was forcing us to steal but I think maybe he paid for it all. So he was sort of a nice illegal driver. We pulled into our hostel super late and the Lord hand of protection was over us the whole time because not only did we literally cross the border illegally, our driver didn’t know where our hostel was. And as soon as Robert finished praying that we would just happen across it (Amman is as big as L.A.), he looked up and we were there. PTL!