The Day After Christmas

Our Dec. 26 2006 was spent a little differently than yours, I'd bet. Also differently from any Boxing Day we had previously spent. You see, while you were standing in line at WalMart or the mall, trying to exchange the stuff you got for the stuff you really wanted to get, we were on a three-hour hike in through a canyon in Jordan, looking at rock walls that had been carved and decorated some 2000 years ago. Petra is the name of this particular canyon, and you may have seen the famous Treasury carved there in the Indiana Jones movies. Here's the first view you get of that after several hours of studying the other carvings in the rocks.

This shot depicts one of the first views Sawyer got of anything that day. He spent most of the descent nestled in his Papaw's jacket, staying out of the cold. When he fell asleep, Papaw would zip his jacket up so that Sawyer was completely covered. He was snug as a bug inside there, and a good bit warmer than any of the rest of us!Here are the sisters posing for the camera. I think there are some 500 caves and things carved into the walls around Petra. You could probably read more about that at National Geographic.com or somewhere like that. When we got down to the bottom, we ate in a restaurant with a big Jordanian buffet. I think we ate in 6 or 8 restaurants like that on this four-day trip. Remarkably, all of the restaurants we visited just happened to serve the tour guide for free. Coincidence?

Here's the whole gang together. It was a lot cooler up there in the mountains than it ever gets down here in the desert. The day after we visited, it snowed so much that we almost couldn't get out of the hotel. Some groups got snowed in.