Goodbye Space Camp, Hello Jordan

The NASA internship is officially over, as of Friday.  We had a great string of presentations, videos, food, families, gifts and certificates, and then, bright and early Saturday morning I was on the road for 11 hours of driving.  Warning: do not drive in VA if you can avoid it.  Every time I do, something catastrophic happens.  This time, my experience included driving over something on the highway, getting a flat tire, being stuck in the middle of the highway on I-95 on a bridge where I couldn't pull over, causing a traffic jam and then a cop making me drive a mile on my hub cabs.  Needless to say, I was delayed.  BUT I finally got to Davidson and was reunited with Jada!  Bex and the rest took excellent care of her, of course. 

One other thing that was interesting about getting stuck on the highway was getting to see the set of people that actually stopped to help me.  The story was very Good Samaritanesque.  Two people stopped to help me and they were both Hispanics who barely spoke English, one with a family in tow, and yet each was willing to help me change a tire or get some gas.  It touched me that two people limited in language were so quick to offer whatever they could, instead of simply focusing on how I was delaying their day.  Of course it's a small subset, and I can't make any broad generalizations about the situation, but it seemed another example of "America"'s fast-paced and self-centralized mentality.

Tomorrow is my big day.  I'm off to Jordan.  A layover in Frankfurt and then I'll actually arrive in Amman, Jordan on the 17th, so two days after I first embarked.  I'll actually be living in Madaba.  Jada is coming with me, so she'll be my little piece of home. 

T.E. Lawrence called Jordan a "vast, echoing and Godlike" place where even the proudest men gazed into the night sky and were "shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of the stars."

I can't wait.