Eid Camping (UAE) - November 16-17, 2010

Off we go for another adventure.  There were more caches on the agenda for this morning.  Again we saw some neat landscapes.  The first picture reminded Wayne and I of place called Goblin State Park in the US due to the mounds of hard packed mud and silt (first picture).  We ended up in a quarry so obviously they were somewhat man-made but still neat looking.  The other neat thing they did at the quarry (just realized I forgot to take a picture) was that they mined the surface gravel but left mounds around all of the trees.  So there are solitary trees standing on platforms / islands of gravel about ten feet above the mined ground level; the entire area covered many square km.  In the second picture we are off on a hike and hunting for a TravelBug Hotel (it's a geocaching thing).

One of our adventures took us to a cool cave.  It wasn't very big but it had an opening out the top.  Patrick thought he would try to climb out it.  He was very close to making it too!

Patrick has taken up surfing in the Omani desert.  He should be a champion, look at that balance :)  Once again Wayne takes a rest while Patrick finds the geocache hiding spot!

We were planning on staying in Oman for both nights, but plans change.  We weren't too happy with what we saw for camping spots so headed to one of our favourite nearby spots in the UAE; Fossil Rock.  One good thing about being super early risers in the morning we are able to get our exploring done early and still have our camp ready for an evening hike and some play time on the dunes.

We were close to some rock outcrops (about 1.5 km away) that had a cache.  We didn't have the coordinates but had tried last year and remembered the general area so thought we would give it a go.  Besides it was a nice hike.  Our goal was to be there by sunset.  We were successful on all fronts (cache found, sunset recorded)!

On the return hike we picked up some more big pieces of firewood that we dragged back.  The campsite and fire were awesome!

The next morning it was actually quite cold for us these days (<15 degrees?).  Wayne had the kids bundled up while I got the fire going, I think he just wanted the snuggles.  The middle shot was through the heat waves of the fire - I so totally took it that way on purpose ;)

After breakfast we tore down and went for a walk.  We found all kinds of bug tracks, some bird tracks that snatched the bugs, and some bigger tracks; Wayne thinks they were from a fox.  The kids had fun following them and speculating what the animals were doing.  While we were loading the truck the kids got playing in the sand making tunnels.  They decided that they would like to do that for a while so Wayne and I actually got some chillaxing and quiet reading done.

A very lovely three days / two nights of camping.  It was a nice week off, relaxing at the end and time to get caught up on the blog :)