Day 16 - Friday, March 24, 2023 - Amman to Woodstock

 A long day!

We left the Kempinski Hotel in Amman a few minutes before midnight and arrived at the Queen Alia Airport at 12:30. Our driver was a friend of Zuhair's who drove us for $50US.

It was a little confusing figuring out where the check-in counter was and when we got there, it wasn't even open yet for our 3:40am flight on Lufthansa to Frankfurt. Our flight actually left a few minutes early at 3:30 and arrived at 6:15. At one point I could look down and clearly see the brightly lit shoreline but don't know it was Turkey or Greece. It was raining lightly in Frankfurt and we had to take a bus to the terminal because we were early and there were no empty gates.

We went to the Z gate area and went to the Business Class line for Lufthansa (code-share for our United flight) and was told that the terminal was down so we had to use the Economy line. While standing in the line, someone asked if we were on United and then just waved us through.

Then another security check before heading to the actual United gate. There was a United check-in stand there but when they looked at our passport, noted that we did a security check in Amman so didn't need to do it here!

We were able to relax and get something to eat in the Lufthansa lounge while waiting for our 11:05am flight to Newark.

It was still raining when we again took the bus out to the jet. When we got on, it was announced that there was a delay because there weren't enough baggage handlers at the airport to load the luggage so we left an hour late.

We arrived in Newark about half an hour late at 3:30pm. Going through customs was interesting. Instead of waiting in the long passport control line, we were able to use the Global Entry line. We just walked up to a kiosk, took our glasses off and looked into the facial-recognition machine. A few seconds late we were cleared to go in - the whole process took about a minute!

Then another 20 minutes to get our luggage and 15 minutes to get the shuttle to the off-airport parking. We were on the road home by 4:30, pretty good time from landing.

We got home at 7pm. A 26-hour day. Maha Anand had turned our heat on so the house was nice and warm.


Our group overlooking the Dome of the Rock

At Old Jaffa with Tel Aviv in the background

At Masada


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