Abu Dhabi & Dubai- Days1 & 2- A Whole New World

Back over Christmas, we heard about a mistake fare for Ethihad Airlines and jumped on the chance to hit Abu Dhabi/Dubai for significantly less than it would normally cost.  Since we had taken most of our vacation time to go on our (amazing!) South Africa trip, we decided to keep this one short—2 days off work which ends up working out to 3 days on the ground once you factor in the long travel time. Amazing race here we come!

We were on a 10:30pm flight out of Dulles on a Thursday night.  Unfortunately, someone on our plane got sick and had to be taken off, so we didn’t end up leaving til about an hour later.  In the interim, we got to know the girl sitting next to us—she was 25 or so, from Austin (so she had already hit a few legs that day), and this trip was the first time she was flying.  Absolutely incredible that her first real flying was being done on such an aggressive trip! Apparently her friend had decided they should all meet up there for her birthday (?!) so they were flying in from all over the States. She was admittedly nervous, but we actually were too given that the attendants were going through the carry-ons one by one asking people to identify that it was theirs in an attempt to find the bag of the person they had to take off.

Anyway, we were off and flew across the Atlantic, Europe, down the Black Sea and into the Middle East. Pretty surreal to see where the plane was on the map given the constant news stories about this part of the world. Also a fun fact that there was a Mecca Locator as an option next to the normal flight tracking map; pretty cool,  We arrived on Friday night, touching down when it was dark so we could have been anywhere.  After going through the long immigration line, we grabbed our rental car (a Nissan Sunny—who knew that was a model?) and that’s when we realized we were truly in a totally different part of the world than we had traveled to before.  With the evening heat, palm trees lining the road, and Arabic on all of the signs we were excited the new adventure. All of the signs had English on them too and we managed to navigate to our Hilton without incident, passing the beautifully lit mosque on the way and grabbing a quick bite once we arrived.