Why Jordan? and Why Me? (And Why I am telling it 9 years later)

For Janine Jervis, Malia Asfour and the entire Jordan Tourism Board North America office. Thank you for opening the door that changed everything for me. Your passion for Jordan shaped countless journeys, and your impact does not end with the closure of the JTBNA office. It continues in the lives you touched – mine included.

Nine years ago, I took my first trip to Jordan, completely by accident. You see, I started my travel blog in 2015, and at the time, I was employed full-time in Canada and blogging about traveling with my family (my boys were 5 and 3 in 2016). We took typical holidays from Vancouver to places like Southern California and Hawaii. Places where almost all of my friends and family vacation. Places with easy nonstop flights. 

The Trip that Changed Everything

That all changed when an email popped up while I was sitting in the dentist’s chair, telling me I had won a trip to Jordan.

Bullshit, I thought. I didn’t even know where Jordan was.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered another blogger writing about their kids playing soccer, something about the U17 Women’s World Cup, and an entry form for a free trip that I must’ve filled out because I wanted to travel more, and why not?

As the hygienist buzzed around my mouth, minty grit, mind swirling, the pieces finally started to line up.

The second I walked out of the office, I reopened the email, found the phone number at the bottom, and hit call. An American number. A tour operator.

The voice on the other end was real. A real person, a real contest, not the scam my 2025 brain would have immediately suspected. And YES, I had actually won an all-expenses-paid trip to Jordan.

There was just one catch.

It was in seven days.

I could spend the next 1000 words telling you more about how my mom, Mattias (age 5), Markus (age 3) and myself ended up on a British Airways flight out of Vancouver 7 days later, but take my word for it that the pieces did all fall into place, that all four of us ended up going on a trip that would change the trajectory of the next decade of my life and bring me to finally putting this all into words.

I will be honest (and naive here – as naive as 99% of the people I know). I had NO IDEA where Jordan was. I assumed the Middle East was one big war zone (this was 2016, and the Syrian war was the only thing I ever caught on TV about the Middle East). I thought we might have armed guards, and I really had no idea what our itinerary entailed.

But anyone who knows me knows I am always pushing past my comfort zone, and when the Jordan Tourism Board assured me it was safe to take my kids there, I said, “ok!”

Surviving a 9-hour long haul with a 3-year-old and a 5-hour layover in Heathrow and then another 5-hour flight to Jordan seemed like one of the hardest things I had done in a long time. I will not lie. It was hard. Markus did NOT want to get on that second flight and sit still. This was a time before tablets and Netflix (but those seatback TVs were a real treat).

I remember that I didn’t sleep the whole way because I was worried about managing Markus and keeping his feet off the seat in front of him (apologies to anyone who has to sit with a child between three and six years old behind them. We DO try and stop the incessant kicking, screen tapping, and try table opening and closing.)

Practical travel advice for parents was a huge part of my early blog posts. Equipping parents with the confidence and the tools to do hard things, to push past their comfort zone, and to travel with their kids, was my goal. Those blog posts still exist on this site; sadly, they are rarely read these days. But they are full of passion, of inspiration, and of real parenting tips from me, a travel-loving mom who was determined to explore with her kids and share with other parents how to do it too!

To be honest, and looking back at what parenting is like with young kids, everything about it is hard. Somehow we survived nearly 24 hours of travel and arrived in Amman, Jordan, with two other “contest winners” (who were both from Canada), and the 6 of us were escorted through customs and immigration, VIP style, and in no time were on the road, in the dark, in the Middle East.

Bare earth and palm trees line the road that exits Queen Alia International Airport in Amman. Big and wide roads without much else to see.

I was in the Middle East.

Somewhere I had no plans to ever visit.

I was nervous, relieved to be done with airplanes, excited and desperate for sleep.

The next morning (I do not even remember how we got the kids to sleep, and then get up the next morning – but thats the great part about young kids and car rides – they sleep anywhere!), we met Awad, our tour guide, who would soon become one of the most influential people in the trajectory of my life for years to come.

For seven straight days, we soaked up every unfamiliar sound, every new flavor, every face, every place. Petra stunned us with its sheer scale. Wadi Rum became an unexpected favorite as we rode across the desert in the back of a 4×4 and spent unforgettable moments running down sand dunes. And everywhere, history surrounded us. We happened upon an excavation of a skeleton while in Umm Qais, and we saw priceless mosaics under canvas tents to protect them from the sun in Mount Nebo and Petra.

We balanced a whirlwind tour with three soccer matches in Amman, and before we knew it, we were back home with souvenir-stuffed suitcases and stories to tell.

It is hard to imagine that in 2016, Instagram stories hadn’t been created yet. I was not photographing and videographing every meal and every moment to share with my growing social media audience. I don’t even recall if these photos came from my iPhone, although I suspect they did, as I had my Canon camera and a GoPro as well, and most of these photos did not come from either of those.

I shared a few curated photos if you care to scroll all the way to the beginning of my Instagram feed, but for the most part, I was soaking in the stories I would write for my blog about what Jordan was like, whether it was safe, and tips for flying long-haul with kids.

Blog posts in 2016 were much like this post. Personal reflections. A voice and a face behind the words, not a monotone SEO voice writing for the Google query that overtook the internet until AI was added to search in 2024. While those SEO blogging days were very good for me, and hundreds of thousands read my blog every month, it was really boring writing; my voice was lost as I wrote to help the reader with their query, not reflect on my own experience.

But those SEO articles allowed me to build a career from scratch.

You see, I arrived home from Jordan and was fired from my job.

It was not a surprise.

I knew it was coming.

And in a way, I am forever grateful.

My boss of over 10 years gave me freedom. He told me to “go chase my dreams, and come back when I was done.”

I am not sure in that moment if either of us knew I would never be back.

From One Trip to a Lifelong Love

Since this isn’t an 80,000-word book, I won’t dive too deep into my personal life. But it wasn’t just a job that disappeared. My well-planned life unraveled fast. I had the husband, the house, the car, the kids—the life everyone is supposed to want.

But I had changed.

While everyone around me silently judged my risky ideas, I was on a high.

I was going to jump headfirst into blogging. I was going to figure out how to actually make money online like the bloggers I read every day. I suddenly had the freedom to say yes to any travel invite that landed in my inbox. I had no idea how I was going to replace the income that paid all our bills, but I was sure I could figure it out.

I wanted to sell everything, just like the nomads whose sites I read daily: World Travel Family, Adventurous Kate, Travel With Bender. People traveling the world and living a life that I didn’t think I could have, because it was not what I was told I was supposed to do.

But I wanted their life.

I no longer wanted the house, the expensive daycare, the two car payments, the mortgage. I wanted something different.

And taking that leap required faith. It was a risk.

A risk, and a life, my husband didn’t want.

Looking back, the simplest way to explain it is this: I changed.

Four months later, after working on my website every single day, I booked three plane tickets to Jordan. I was taking Mattias and Markus back with me. We were going for more than a month. I wanted space. I wanted out of the rat race in Canada. And I wanted to go back to the place that had changed everything.

The first person who knew I was going back to Jordan was my tour guide from 2016, Awad. He lined up an apartment for me to rent and was at the airport to meet us when we got off the plane!

He had arranged a trip back to Petra, three full days to explore, another 4×4 trip in the desert before a night in Wadi Rum (something we had not done on our first trip due to the soccer matches), and then to Aqaba, another place we did not have the chance to visit on our whirlwind tour in 2016.

Awad had become an unexpected ally in my new journey. The only person who did not know the Lindsay who existed before my trip to Jordan. The only person who was not invested in me following life’s supposed tos. And he encouraged my new life.

I was supposed to travel to Jerusalem for a blogging conference, and my mum was going to join me there to take care of the kids. But commitments at home and ailing family members meant that she had to cancel her plans. While she felt horrible, I was content in Jordan and I cancelled my attendance at the conference.

I spent five weeks in Jordan with the boys that spring of 2017. We rented a car for two weeks and visited Dana Nature Reserve, Feynan Ecolodge, tried out different camps in Wadi Rum, wandered around Amman, and played on playgrounds with local kids. I reviewed hotels in Petra on my website, wrote about things to do with kids in Jordan, had a $10 doctor’s visit (after a week of a nasty stomach virus for Mattias), floated at the Dead Sea, explored a bit of the north, and on days that Awad was not guiding other guests, he joined our adventures.

I came home from Jordan with a clear path forward: a divorce, selling our house, investing the money from the sale, and taking $20,000 to travel with the kids and build my website. The heartbreak of ending my marriage, selling a home in a neighborhood I loved, and uprooting my kids to live with my parents was softened by the excitement of the new life I was creating.

In my head, the plan was simple. I’d island-hop across the Pacific, chase the sun I’ve always loved, and live the kind of freedom I read about from Allison at World Travel Family, Adventurous Kate, and Erin from Travel With Bender.

What I didn’t plan on was falling in love with a man who called Jordan home. Awad.

Even when we weren’t in the same place, we spoke for hours every day. The distance never mattered. Neither did the time zone. We shared an intimacy and closeness that left a permanent mark on my life.

Over the next few years, I visited Jordan as often as I could. Awad would spend the slow work times in Canada or being dragged around the world by me. He wasn’t a traveller like me, but he never complained.

It was finally in 2019 that I launched Step Into Jordan and the Jordan Travel Community on Facebook because there was no single blog on the internet that was answering the basic questions about getting around in Jordan. While my travel website, Carpe Diem OUR Way was getting enough traffic to earn me a decent amount of income to further my travels, the content on Jordan was not being indexed well by Google.

On Step into Jordan, I wrote dozens of blog posts, from tips to choosing the right tour, how to get from Amman to Petra, and other basic queries that no one else was blogging about. While bloggers were going to Jordan and writing about it, the average blog post on the internet was either an itinerary for Jordan or what to do in Jordan. No other blogger on the internet knew the ins and outs of everything a tourist would want to do in the country and how to do it. And I had something else that other travel writers did not have. Awad.

COVID was the only thing that kept me away from Jordan and Awad.

I’ll be honest, I barely touched my Jordan articles during COVID. Like almost everyone else, I stayed home with my kids, leaned into slow living, and felt for friends and family who had to cancel their travel plans.

Awad and I talked on the phone daily. For hours. Both of us had nothing but time on our hands. We talked about life after COVID, and I finally convinced him that he should start a food tour in Amman.

Being a tour guide is a LOT of work. Anyone who has ever been on a tour knows it. Long days away from home, needy clients, putting out fires. As guests, we enjoy a seamless experience and enjoy the time of our lives, but behind the scenes, there is always something going on that the guides have to deal with.

My travels had shown me that food tours were hugely popular. Awad came from a culinary background. He had owned restaurants and genuinely loved the work that came with it. He was the perfect fit.

We launched Amman Food Tours together in May 2022. Markus (who was now nine) and I had gone back to Jordan to work on the menu and guest expectations. Awad’s expertise shaped the walk, chose the restaurants, and brought the stories behind each dish to life. Just three days after the website went live, we had our first booking. We were both ecstatic. The following week, Awad, Markus, and I welcomed our very first guest, an Australian woman who told us she had been searching for something exactly like this and was thrilled to have found it before she arrived in Amman.

The next day, I flew home, proud of what we had built and eager to update all of my website articles with the post-COVID changes.

That was the last time I ever saw Awad.

Six months later, he died from long-term complications caused by cancer and chemo treatments he’d undergone during COVID.

Losing him wasn’t just the end of one of the most impactful relationships in my life; it was the end of a chapter that shaped everything I knew and loved about Jordan.

Where Grief Met Purpose

The shock and the immediate “I’m so sorry” that comes out every time I tell this story is probably the hardest part of it now.

I can’t talk about Amman Food Tours without telling the backstory. I can’t talk about Jordan without talking about Awad.

But in the almost three years since his passing, I’ve been able to appreciate and be grateful for the “Awad” chapter of my life. My relationship with him showed me that nothing is forever. Life is chapters. Some parts carry into the next ones, and some end. As hard as that truth is, it’s okay.

I look back at the photos of my five- and three-year-old boys on our first trip to Jordan with so much fondness. I was so happy. And at the same time, I grieve those moments. Awad was an incredible part of my Jordan story.

But the story didn’t end with his death for one reason.

Jumana.

Jumana was the unexpected chapter that allowed my Jordan story, and Amman Food Tours, to continue. I probably would never have gone back to Jordan if it weren’t for her. But because of her, the story didn’t stop.

Just four days after I left Jordan in May 2022, Awad landed in the Emergency Room with a twisted bowel, a complication from his cancer surgery the year before. Emergency surgery saved his life, but his health declined so quickly that he decided it was best to be in Canada to figure out why the complications lingered.

Awad called Jumana and asked her to take a couple who had booked a tour. He didn’t want to cancel on them or lose the momentum Amman Food Tours was gaining. While he was here in Canada, Jumana continued to lead the evening tours and she found she genuinely enjoyed the work.

One day in December, I spoke to Awad from his hospital bed. He asked me to call Jumana and send her the tour details because he didn’t have a phone charger with him.

That was our last conversation.

More tours were booked that holiday season, and I messaged Jumana, “Do you like doing this? I can handle the bookings and the website if you want to keep working.”

She said yes.

And Amman Food Tours continued. I still don’t know if I wanted that connection to Awad, or to Jordan, or both. If you’ve read the “About Us” page, you know he’s still mentioned there, because there is no Amman Food Tours without him.

But today, the story is about Jumana.

She is an absolute star. Five stars, in fact. She loves giving visitors a taste of the food culture of Amman, and every single guest leaves the tour with glowing praise.

And for me, being able to provide meaningful employment to a local woman, especially in an industry where women are still underrepresented, is one of the things I’m most proud of. Empowering her work, supporting her talent, and building something sustainable together feels like the natural next chapter of this story.

In October 2023, I returned to Jordan with the Jordan Tourism Board and ATTA for a regional conference. My first time back without Awad. I was nervous. I didn’t know if I would still love Jordan without him in it.

I filled my calendar so there wouldn’t be too many quiet moments to think about it. I spent two evenings in Amman with Jumana and media colleagues, weaving through the streets on our Evening Food Tour. We had bookings lined up almost every night that month.

I was proud to see what we had designed over countless conversations had come to life in such a meaningful way. I was proud to give Jumana meaningful work. I was grateful to keep a connection to Jordan alive.

Then the war in Gaza began, and tourism in the Middle East came to a sudden standstill. Even now, as 2025 comes to an end, tourism in Jordan is still only a fraction of what it was in 2023, the same year Petra welcomed one million visitors for the first time.

Can you believe that? The biggest year Jordan has ever had… and Petra still saw only one million tourists. In a world where European cities are overwhelmed and locals are outnumbered by visitors, Jordan remains refreshingly authentic.

When you visit Jordan, you’ll have a local guide. A local driver. You’ll eat in restaurants surrounded by locals. Jordan simply doesn’t have the kind of tourism infrastructure built for mass tourism, the way many overtouristed places do.

Don’t get me wrong, Jordan has five-star hotels, it hosts major conferences, and it has plenty of world-class experiences for visitors. But it’s still a place where it’s easy to meet people on the street, have real conversations, and actually feel connected to the country you’re visiting.

Last month, I flew back to Jordan for the first time since 2023 and stayed with Jumana and her mom in their home. We spent four days walking the streets of Amman, brainstorming the next phase of Amman Food Tours. Two women building something meaningful, sustainable, and rooted in local culture.

One afternoon, we wandered through the neighborhood where I rented an apartment back in 2017. I thought about walking to the building, seeing what had changed, what had stayed the same. Instead, I walked the other direction—toward something new.

Toward the future of my relationship with Jordan.

And toward the future of our tour: women-led, locally grounded, and built with purpose.

Jumana, second from Left, and Lindsay, second from Right, and the powerhouse female team at the Jordanian Kitchen.