Back in Action

Well it has been a few days since we posted something to the blog. J has been busy putting pictures up and talking about some of the cool things we did with G & L. It was a very busy, but great week.

I will say, one of the coolest things we all did was "dune bashing" with Arabian Adventures. What a crazy experience. We met the driver at the Family Food Center joked around a little with the "King of the Desert" and then headed out to the dunes. Once we got to the first sign of tall, sandy dunes we pulled over and deflated the tires to around 20psi (for all you car geeks out there). This is so we could have more surface area on the tires in order to float along the top and not get stuck.

After we were done that it was time for dune bashing. If I can recall properly the line the King said was, "I will test you to see if we can have fun or not." I guess we passed the test as the first big dune we headed down was huge, or so we thought (they go bigger). Now I know what you may be thinking, "Big deal, so they went up and down some sand dunes." Let me tell you, these were not for the faint of heart or a rookie driver. There is a reason our driver was called the King. The dunes are virtually straight down with an abrupt stop at the bottom and we hurled ourselves over in a 7 passenger Toyota Land Cruiser. These are the best of the best off-road luxury vehicles you can buy in the Gulf. We did this for about 3 hours and every time we went over a dune, our driver was trying to scare us a little more. I may have made the mistake of saying that he would have to do a lot better if he wanted to make me nervous. He sure tried hard. I won't mention any names (Little J), but there was a ton of squealing from the back of the SUV.

I don't have any pictures on my computer yet (will add later), but this was amazing. We would drive along the top of a dune that is not any wider than 10 feet (just enough for the Land Cruiser) at around 50km/hr. If you have ever driven is fresh soft snow and noticed that the car takes a little longer to respond to steering you will know why this is an important point. After we drove along the top, the driver pointed the nose of the truck off the edge and punched it. The average height of the dunes we went down were likely 75-80 feet and the slope was 75-80 degrees. The Jurassic Park Ride at Universal Studios is not quite as tall as these drops.

The insane drops were just a small portion of the fun we had. High speed driving in the desert was very cool. We would travel at close to 100km/hr across the top of a dune and then drop over the edge and whip around the top of the face at a near vertical pitch. Then we whisked across the desert to visit a camel rancher at a mere 120km/hr over rolling dunes. Unreal is all I can say.

Then we went back to the camp, had a great meal, smoked some shisha, and then came home through the desert in the dark. Like I said, we will have pictures up of this trip soon, but I couldn't wait anymore to talk about it.