Al ain Archives - Home Is Where The Plane Lands

I love my little man

First and foremost, it has been one year since the birth of my baby boy Logan. He was born one year ago on May 26th, 2009! Time really does fly when you have children. I took the little guy over to have a few hour’s play time with some of the other babies in our complex. He had such a great time and it was so fun to watch him interact with people his size for a change. It honestly feels like yesterday that we took him home from the hospital. That little guy amazes me every day. He is truly a blessing from God.

GEDSC DIGITAL CAMERA — Happy 1st Birthday, Logan!

I talk about the heat here a LOT, I know, but it keeps getting hotter. It now averages about 111 degrees here each day. At night, it’s still in the 90s. That makes us not want to do anything outside. I can see why the malls are so busy here all the time. People leave their houses and the malls are the only cool place to go hang out. We’ve been hanging out in the malls a lot too. We don’t really buy much other than groceries, but just getting out and walking helps to relieve the boredom. Of course, with the heat, I’ve had to be very selective about which Geocaches I go after. The ones in the desert will just have to stay hidden! I’m at 57 (as of tonight) caches found and I want to be at 75 before I leave on July 8^th. Should be doable.

Speaking of malls, we hit up the two biggest ones in Dubai in the last few weeks. The newest one, the Dubai mall, the world’s largest

mall, opened last year and sits at the bottom of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. We’ve been to this mall before but never to the Dubai Fountain. Illuminated by 6,600 lights and 25 colored projectors, it is 275 m (902 ft) long and shoots water 150 m (490 ft) into the air, accompanied by a range of classical to contemporary Arabic and world music. It was built at a cost of AED 800 million (USD 218 million). Yeah, I totally copied and pasted that last line from Wikipedia. It is a really neat fountain though and was fun to watch. 218 Million for a fountain though? Sheesh! Last week we went to the Mall of the Emirates. This mall is about 5 years old, but it’s the famous one with the indoor sky slope inside it. Yeah, they built a ski slope inside a mall. It’s a great idea for people over here I guess. But being an American, I know back home I can drive a few hours and ski on a real mountain. It’s still pretty darn impressive here though.

So here’s a little info about our London trip coming up. The Staton family originally came over to England from Normandy in 1066 with William the Conqueror. Back then we were the “Stauntons”. While in England, we were guardians of a tower (which is now named Staunton Tower) in the famous Belvoir Castle. Some of my relatives seem to think we were royalty and owned the castle. While that certainly isn’t true, it’s always been a HUGE goal of mine to go visit “my castle”. With the vacation to London in July coming up, a side trip of an hour and half north to see the castle was a must. Trouble is, the castle is closed to tourist in July. No idea why, but it is. So I did some emailing. The castle is also the residence of the Duke of Rutland. He and his fmaily live in part of the castle; the rest of it and the gardens outside are for tourist. So I

emailed the staff and asked if there was ANY way I could come have a tour since I would only be in England for a short time. A very nice lady named SallyAnn emailed me back a few days later and said that she wasn’t sure, but she would ask His Grace if it would be possible. Yeah, I had to get permission from the freggin’ Duke of Rutland. I thanked her over and over and last week she emailed me again and said that His Grace, the Duke of Rutland, would be happy for me to come to my… err… his castle. In fact, they’re giving us a private one and half hour tour of it, and then we’re free to wander the gardens as much as we like. How cool is that? Should I mention that it’s technically my castle and that I’m staying? Probably not.

Play rehearsals are in full swing for my upcoming production of Hansel and Gretel. Directing children can sure be a challenge though. Unlike a classroom environment, I have to work with small groups one at a time, leaving the other kids unsupervised. Thankfully the room is small and I find ample things for the other kids to do – like LEARN THEIR LINES. Get this – I’m the writer, director and narrator of the play. The director part is a given since I’m the teacher. I had to rewrite the play though so it fit with the number of kids I had. And I really didn’t have enough kids to fill the role of narrator, and Alanna said no, so I’m doing that as well. Our performance is June 11^th so let’s hope it all comes together!

Now I know I said it’s really too hot to Geocache, but this weekend a group of us are heading to Oman to do just that. There is a cache there that was placed in 2002, and it’s the oldest cache in the area. I wanted to get it before we left for the summer. So a small group of us are heading out bright and early Saturday morning to get it. Yeah, it will be 100 degrees before 10am, but who cares right???

Alrighty folks, I’ll wrap it up here. Take care!

More pics –

Feelin’ Hot Hot Hot!

The temperature here is over 100 every day now. And it’s April. Lovely. It’s still decently cool in the evenings though so at least I have that on my side. Soon enough though the temps won’t get down under 90 at night either. Crazy, hot, sticky desert.

The weekend was GREAT. Alanna and I had a date night. That means no Logan. I love the little guy and all, but Mommy and Daddy need some time away too. Working in “the arts” has some perks now and then. I scored some free tickets to see a workshop and performance by Wynton Marsalis. I’ll be honest – I knew he was a trumpet player and has a brother named Brandford, that’s about it. I figured it would be an entertaining time nonetheless. Wow. Can I go on record? Best concert ever. The guy was amazing. We got there early. It was a small theatre with a tiny stage. We were in thee 5th row dead center. Show time rolls around and Marsalis along with his band come out on stage. For the first 45 minutes or so, they did this amazing little workshop. Wynton talked about Jazz, the different elements of it such as improve, collective improve, call and reply, etc. As he explained each topic, he would then have the band play if for us. It was so a cool experience to have someone that talented talk and teach so passionately about something he obviously loves. They took a 20 minute break, then came back and played a concert for about an hour. Amazing stuff. New Orleans Jazz music rocks! Wynton Marsalis and his band are amazing. I can now say I am a huge jazz fan.

I found out that there was a new Geocache placed in my area earlier in the week and it hadn’t been found by Friday morning. I was excited. Cachers pride themselves on being FTF – First To Find. So I headed out at 6:30 in the morning all alone (Alanna wimped out and stayed in bed). The cache was over the border in Oman, but only about a 20 minute drive from my place. I took a long winding dirt/gravel road until the wimpy car wouldn’t dare go any further. I had to walk the last 2.5kms, which at 7am wasn’t such a bad thing. I found the cache quickly enough once I got there, did my business and then took some pics. The cache is located next to a lovely, out of the way Wadi.

Wadi – Riverbed in the Middle East, that can be dry or full of running water depending on the season and how much rainfall it gets.

There was a expat family camping at one end of the wadi, so I headed up the other direction, taking some pics of wild flowers, a natural land bridge, and a few other cool nature shots. After a rest break I hiked back to the car and was home before 10am. I normally don’t even like getting out of bed before 10am. Good times though!

Logan has been on and off sick for awhile now AND pulling on his ears so we caved in, thinking it an ear infection, and took him to the doctor. You all know my fears of doctors and hospitals. Today was great though. A very nice doctor saw us immediately, checked Logan out thoroughly, then prescribed some drugs for us and we were on our way. Total time in the hospital – 30 minutes. Total Cost for the visit and the drugs – about 12USD. Nice! Turns out the little guy does NOT have an ear infection, just a nagging cold.

I’ve been working on a short children’s play for my drama kids to present in Mid June. I got an idea from the web and basically rewrote the whole thing. We’re even bringing in the youth choir to sing songs during the play. It will be a blast to put on a full production!

And lastly…

A special thanks to Google Earth. I have this lovely image of a What-A-Burger with cheese and a Sun Drop stuck in my brain. Mmmmm….

Take care, all!

A true desert experience

Hello, boys and girls. I hope all is well with all of you who read this. Except for Duke fans. I hope you all have nasty colds.

I’ve been keeping busy since last we spoke. Well, you didn’t speak. You just silently read my blog without commenting. For shame. Anyway, on to the show. Err… blog. Like, I said – busy busy busy. Because of my little infection, I missed two weeks of Drama lessons and my kids were sorely lacking in their Theatrical development. Once I got to feeling better, I treated them to two special weekend workshops – Mask Making and Makeup. We even let other kids who weren’t in my classes come to the workshops for free, which tripled my class sizes for the lessons. Anything that is offered free people just flock to, don’t they? The workshops went really well. Nothing against the good ole’ UAE, but they are lacking in Mask and Makeup supplies. I had to make do with what I could find, but adding the “you can buy this stuff at your local store” ideas to the lessons made the kids excited about trying things on their own. And, of course, all the older kids just had to have some gross cut, gash, bruise, black eye, etc etc etc. Though I am in NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM any type of good makeup artist, I do a pretty good job with gross projects. Spring break (for the drama kids) is next week, then we’ll start the final semester of the year. We’re gearing up to go a play in mid June!

Alanna and I have been wanting to go camping since we arrived in the Middle East. We both have quite a bit of camping history in our lives, though we just didn’t find the time to camp in the States in the last couple years. Everyone here kept talking about how cool “desert camping” was, so we finally decided to give it a try. I asked around on some Expat forums where a good spot was, and got tons of ideas. We finally chose a spot about an hour away towards Abu Dhabi, that just happened to have quite a few Geocaches around it. Camping supplies are cheap here too. We got a 3 person tent and two sleeping bags for the equivalent of $40. Firewood though, as you might imagine, is in short supply in the desert. We did find one Souk that sold it in bundles though. So we haggled with the nice man and got 4.

We planned to camp just one night, to give it a good college try, so after Alanna got home from school on Thursday, we packed up the car with supplies and headed West. The spot that was suggested to us was easy enough to find. We got their a couple hours before sunset to give ourselves time to set up and then get a fire going. We drove down a sand road with dunes all around us until the road came to a dead end. We parked the car there out of the way and got out to look for a good spot to pitch our tent. I grabbed two arm full loads of supplies, Alanna grabbed Logan, and we headed off into the dunes. We didn’t want to go too far because, A) we’re lazy and B) we didn’t want to leave the car all alone and too far away from us. So after travelling over a couple of dunes, we found a nice small hollow (Logan) and decided to make it our home for the night. I quickly set up the tent and two chairs. The plan was to have Alanna watch Logan and I would handle all the manual labor. Well, after 4 or 5 trips to and from the car later, I was tired. Walking over sand dunes with bundles of firewood is not easy. Eventually though, I had loaded all the stuff in the tent and we were sitting in… ok… I was sitting in the chairs. Alanna has a thing about bugs though. The flies were bothering her, so she took Logan into the tent (which was MUCH hotter than sitting outside because of the nice breeze) and played with him for awhile. I relaxed and waited for the sun to start slipping down behind the dunes. Once it did, I quickly worked up a lovely fire. One part former Boy Scout, one part dry, easy to light firewood, and soon enough we had a blazing fire just as the sun set. Alanna and Logan joined me beside the fire once it got going. It was quite cozy. The temperature dropped to a nice 70F after the sun went down, so the fire felt great. Not too hot, not too cold. Around 8pm, I made dinner. I chose to go with the classic Hobo Meal for dinner. I’ve known the recipe since I was a wee lad. You basically take your choice of meat, add some veggies and what not, all chopped up and then place them on some heavy aluminum foil. Then you place another bit of foil on top of everything, wrap it up, and throw it on the hot coals of the fire for 20 minutes. Once its done, tug it out of the fire, let it cool off for a few minutes, then cut it open like a baked potato and fork it out for a great meal. I’d even marinated the meat all day to give it some extra taste. My recipe was hamburger meat, chopped carrots, potatoes, onions and corn. It was DELICIOUS.

We all sat around the fire for a few more hours before finally heading into the tent. The night went downhill from there. It wasn’t horrible though, just not the wonderful sleeping experience I was wishing for. I blame the 10 month old baby. I should probably blame his parents for dragging him out to sleep in a tent in the middle of the desert. But since Logan can’t defend himself, he’s easier to blame. The combination of Logan not sleeping at all and the ground not letting either Alanna or I get comfy made for a loooong night. We were very happy to see the sunrise. We peaked our heads out of the tent around 6:30am and there was… fog. It is weird to see a blanket of fog in the desert. We had ourselves a cereal bar and OJ breakfast, then I packed up everything and we made our way back to the car, which was thankfully still there and in one piece.

The rest of the morning we spent Geocaching around the outskirts of Abu Dhabi. We found 4 out of the 5 caches we searched for. The one we didn’t find, beside a giant (think 50 feet tall) birdcage complete with an eagle inside, was probably muggled – someone had removed the object that the cache was attached to. We did make our way up a man made mountain though. Don’t ask, I have no idea why they made a mountain here. But there was a geocache near the top so we grabbed it. We found a few more caches that day – one at a busy camel racetrack, one at the abandoned endurance village, and another out in the middle of nowhere. We finished up the morning and were back in Al Ain about 11am.

Note to self – Camping with a baby is a no go. Drop the little rugrat off with his grandparents next time.

Some new pics… enjoy!