Dead Sea, Jordan

Our next trip with Grandma was to Jordan and first stop was our favorite hotel the Kempenski. It's a beautiful hotel with great architecture that is very modern but inspired by the old structures you might find out in the desert. The Dead Sea is a very neat place because it feels more like your visiting the moon with almost no natural vegetation. One thing that struck us was how quite the sea is. Usually when your that close to a large body of water you will hear boats and jet skis all day. In the Dead Sea there is not a single boat. Our driver told us that the border patrol (Dead Sea is on the Jordan Israel border) runs a boat twice a day to do patrols and they immediately remove it from the water and wash it after each run to reduce corrosion. As you may have heard, the water is so salty that you float with no effort, but be careful not to get it in your eye. As Grandma found out it really hurts, her eye watered for good hour after getting the burning drop in it. Here she is enjoying a relaxing float in the water. We spent most of our time playing in the nice (fresh water) pools. This is the second time I've been to this hotel (Steve was supposed to be with us too but had a last minute work trip to the UK and US come up) and this time I really appreciated how they designed the pools. They have a large portion of it just at ankle/calf depth which is perfect for a little guy just learning to walk who loves water. The new word we learned was 'pree' because all that nice stone around the pools was very slipPREE. He had a great time splashing around and enjoying the cool water. We also learned that Jaydon likes to play in the sand almost as much as he likes to play in the water. We headed down to the beach and had fun getting sand everywhere. On the very last morning before we left we had to make one last trip to the beach so that Grandma could go and play in the famous Dead Sea mud. She wasn't into it at first but got the hang of it once a nice British lady helped her out. Jaydon was not sure what to think about his Grandma covered in black mud and being all "dirt-tee". We all got a pretty good laugh from his reaction to the whole situation. And no he didn't get to play in the mud for the same reason that he didn't go in the sea - to much salt (not exactly the 'tear-free' version).