'Cause I'd get a thousand hugs From ten thousand lightning bugs

This weekend Nate, Brianna, and I decided to return to Wadi Rum. We had planned on doing this a couple weekends ago, but then Joe got sick and a four day weekend seemed to be too good of an opportunity to pass up, so instead we went to Israel, but that may have been a mistake, because going back to Wadi Rum was awesome.

After buying food for the weekend (a jar of peanut butter, several pieces of fruit, and some bread each) thursday afternoon, we met early Friday morning and headed to the bus station. We took a bus to Wadi Musa (just outside of Petra) and from there we got a ride to the visitors center. It was in this truck that we heard the title song, which is apparently the #1 song in both the US and Canada right now, and the number 1 seller on itunes too....none of us knew this at the time and we just starting cracking up, because the lyrics are nuts.

After eating lunch while looking at the 5 pillars of wisdom, we started walking down the road to Rum village. About half way we got a ride from a nice guy who told us to make sure that we were back from our walk by 5, because the sun sets at 5:30. We clearly had no intention of doing this, but we also weren't quite sure if we were allowed to just walk out into the desert and camp, so we didn't tell him our plans. After he dropped us of, we did just that. Walking in the desert is hard, so I'm not sure how far we got, but we hiked for about 2.5 hours before we found a rock formation that looked promising and then we scrambled up and started looking for flat spots to camp. We found a couple okay ones, spent some time throwing sandstone rocks off of cliffs (they explode and make ridiculous amounts of noise), and watched a really fast sunset. Then Nate found a sweet camping spot that was much better than our other ones, and we started collecting firewood. We were all ready to fall asleep at about 7, but managed to keep ourselves awake until 9 looking at stars and sitting around the fire.

This morning we woke up and climbed around on the rocks around our campsite and watched the sunrise before walking back to rum village. After an impromptu soccer game with some kids there, we started walking back to the visitor center. Again, we got a ride about halfway which was nice because it's an annoying 2 mile walk on a road...Once we got back to village we found a truck that would drive us out to kings highway where we were supposed to be able to get busses back to Amman. Our friendly truck drivers dropped us off at a gas station, where we waited for a bus for about 10 minutes until Nate made friends with another truck driver who said he would take us back to Amman for free. Which he did. It was pretty cool to ride in the cab of one of those big trucks, and he dropped us off about 5 km south of amman, where we got a city bus back to down town and then taxi's home. So all in all, less than 20 jd's a piece for food and transportation for a camping trip to arguably the coolest place in the country. Sweet.

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