Desert Camping

When I think of camping, I imagine tall trees, clear streams, waterfalls perhaps... maybe a lake... Anyway, I certainly don't imagine miles of empty sand dunes.  But that is exactly the scenery that Lacey and I had on our recent camping trip outside Dubai.  We road tripped out to Al Sharja, a neighboring emirate, and then turned our 4-wheel drives off the road directly into the desert.  After tooling around for an hour or so (partly to find a good camping spot, partly to have fun "duning" in the sand) we settled down and set up camp.  Luckily, none of the SUVs in our caravan got stuck, though

 there were some close calls sliding down the sides of the 50+ foot mountains of sand.

Finally we arrived, set up camp, and started a fire; we set up a disc golf course around the edges of the "bowl" we were in and played a couple rounds before it began getting dark.  Then we made some grub on a grill someone had brought. While we sat around the fire talking and eating, we decided that we would play a game of Capture the Flag.  The question was, how would we see where the flag was?  Miraculously, someone had an inkling that we might play this game and brought glow-sticks to use as flags and also to hang around each person's neck.  It worked perfectly!  The blue team won (go blue team!).

When it was time to head to bed, we crawled into our cheap tent we picked up at Carfur, the Wal-Mart of the Middle East, and went to sleep to the sound of nothing...

Here are a few more photos you might enjoy taking a look at.  All of these enlarge if you click on them.