Camping Where the Desert Meets the Ocean, Part 1

Three whole weeks have passed since we went on this camping trip and I cannot believe that neither one of us has made any effort to chronicle the weekend’s events until this point.

Anyway, bright and early at the crack of 12:30 in the afternoon, we set off in our caravan of SUVs with some fellow compound neighbors for adventure on what I like to call the West Coast (I am still humored by the fact that we can drive coast to coast in 1.5 hours).  An hour and a half later we arrived at the small town of Zekreet, and this is when we left the asphalt and was only the beginning. For an additional hour we drove off road through the desert, the terrain was mostly rocky and only sometimes sandy, the truck took a real beating from all the bumps, lucky she is a rental I guess. After driving just long enough for my internal organs to develop an understanding of how a martini shaker feels, we came to a stop and the leader of the convoy got out of his vehicle to explain how we were all going to get down the rather sheer section of rock ahead of us. Having grown up a city boy driving a little two-seater sports car for the last nine years, I had never been introduced to the exciting world of locking hubs and tires lifting off the ground due to a poor center of gravity, so, now I know how cool it is. So in spite of the bumping, jostling, climbing and the goofy ear to ear grin that Emily was making fun of me for, we arrived safely. 

This is how it looked. 

The Driving

An excerpt from my drive home:

Driving home from work yesterday I was merging onto a six lane road, I had two people cut in front of the vehicle in front of me forcing him to merge into the middle of the three lanes and as I did not feel like patiently waiting while for the lackadaisical driver of the Camry in front of to get up to speed I merged into the far left passing lane to get around him. As I am smiling to myself and listening to the Detroit muscle growl it's way past the pitiful four-bangers, I happen to look into the rear view mirror and see the poor driver of the Camry (now also in the far right lane) getting mercilessly flashed with the high beams of a Toyota Landcruiser. The frightened driver of the Camry instantly understanding his mistake at entering the “Landcruisers Only”, lane moves back to the middle lane as quickly as possible. Seeing all of this transpire in my rearview I imagine this to be a very important Qatari who has many important places to go, so as soon as I am able I also merge back into the center lane, thus avoiding the highbeam wrath of the Lancruiser.

After speeding by me and not half a mile later, the driver of the Landcruiser is forced to stop at the stoplight that everyone else is at. At the light the center lane of cars is shorter than the left lane and so I am able to move closer to the light and thus pass the very important driver of the Lancruiser. Upon doing so I cannot resist a look to the left to catch a glimpse of how important this driver must be (and possibly see some burka clad woman giving birth or something…) As I am finally able to see the driver of the vehicle I am not able to resist the urge to literally laugh out loud, sitting at the stoplight I cannot help but howl with laughter at the ludicrousness of the whole situation. The driver of the Landcruiser is just some little sixteen year old Arab boy, someone gave him the keys to a brand new Landcruiser and told him that he was super special. With their actions his parents have shown him, “don’t worry if you wreck it, daddy has three more and don’t worry if you kill someone in an accident, they will most likely be Pakistani and we won’t have to pay the family very much.”

I love Qatar, something new and exciting every day,

I just had to laugh…