Travel

Let's talk about travel. We are seeing some of the world and that is a great thing, but to get around means time spent in airports and on airplanes. To make a trip from Doha to Knoxville will take most of 24 hours, to make that trip in coach feels like a week. One of these days, I hope to get enough miles to upgrade to Business class, the only way to go.

We have learned a few things, the first is never fly through London, UK. Crowded, rude, not customer friendly, more expensive airports, we have started to use Frankfurt Germany, newer, cleaner, less crowded, etc. The time is about the same so we like that routing better. Something else we have started to use is a card called "Priority Pass" which gives us access to airline clubs in about 500 airports around the world. We have used the Delta Crown Room at Frankfurt during layovers, naps, food, rest away from the cheap seats, it really helps to break up the trip and the price is great for us.

Delta is starting a direct Atlanta to Dubai flight this summer, only problem is 14 hours in the plane, we tried NY to Dubai once and that much time in coach is tough. It does speed up the trip because of one less stop and one less layover. More later.

Sand Camping

More pictures

I am going to post a few pictures of our camping trip to the dunes in Qatar

Forts. Forts everywhere. Some from the 16th century

The mountains of Oman 

I forgot Oman

Oman was Fall Break. It is a nice country and if I was recommending an Arabic country to visit, this would probably be the one. It has more history than Qatar, not as developed as Dubai, and more non-Muslim friendly than Kuwait. We did make a mistake in trying to stay in Muscat, the capital, and make day trips. Way too much driving. We should have stayed in a couple of different cities or parts of the country and seen each area. Oh well live and learn.

Christmas and return

We completed the first semester on the 2006-2007 school year on Dec 1st. Doha was hosting the Asian Games, the 2nd largest sporting event behind the Olympics, and most schools, etc finished the semester to allow for less traffic, etc before the 13,500 athletics and officials hit Doha. We left town on Dec 3rd to spend 5 weeks in the states, mainly playing with our grand daughter. It was great and she made it even harder to leave Tennessee, but ah we must.

Doha averages 5 days of rain a year, as luck or something would have it, during the 15 days of the Games they had 10 days of rain. It is still raining, so to speak, we had a big rain today, so strange weather seems to be happening everywhere. It was too bad about the rain for the opening ceremony on Dec 1st, but having watched the openings of other sporting events, I will say that Doha was one of the best I have seen. Watching the construction of roads, venues, etc for the last 18 months, I had questions if they could pull this off. This is not the world's largest country and at this time not one of the most advanced, but they made it happen with very few problems. They will be advanced before the next 5 years, money does buy technology and starting from scratch in 1995 means that they don't have to replace a lot of things because they didn't have them to start with.

The weather besides the rain has been cool for Doha, they have had night at 48/49 deg and highs of 60. Everybody bundles up like we would in TN if it was 25 deg. They are breaking out the coats, earmuffs, etc. while we think this is great weather. All the flowers are in bloom, rain has been great but we think these are spring days. The Qatari people have been so cold, they have sold out of heaters at all the stores, not a heater to be had in Doha during Dec and most of Jan. We have one we bought last year and have only used twice in two winters.

We were going to loan it to a friend that had a cold apartment while we were in the US but our key ended up in AduDubi with a friend that had stayed here while we were gone and walked off with it. Somedays stuff happens and people are cold.