A United attack fare lead to a trip to Bahrain, the UAE, and Kuwait. Definitely not a “normal” place for most Americans to vacation, but who ever said that I was normal? Luckily I have other friends that are into weird trips, so Aaron and I set off on this one…

As this is a TBT post, here are my [mostly unedited] thoughts from the trip over a year and a half later… yeah, yeah, I need to work on that! I’ll add – this was my first more ‘out there’ destination. Previously, I had only traveled to Europe, Central America, and the Caribbean, and I find it interesting to look back on my thought process during this trip. [Any added comments are in brackets.]

Thursday: Abu Dhabi (Nov 7)

We slept in a little bit in the morning and then drove a few km to the Grand Mosque… it was huge!!! I wore an abaya and headscarf again to be able to go inside to see it. It was pretty phenomenal. But holy hell it was hot outside. After that we drove around near the souqs a bit, but they were very much geared toward people who live here… selling plants and drying racks and such. Following that we went back to our lovely hotel and I went for a run in the gym and took a bath to clean up afterwards. We went on a walk to the Emirates Palace before dinner (another really nice hotel… apparently the ATM dispenses gold bars!!) and then we were trying to find this sushi place… which we never succeeded in doing, so we got cake and cookies and went back to the hotel to eat them with coffee and tea delivered by our butler 🙂 

Friday: Dubai (Nov 8)

Had breakfast at the St Regis and packed up for the drive back to Dubai. We got to the Dubai Mall and walked around for a bit (and finished souvenir shopping!) before we got to go to the top of the Burj! It was crazy how fast the elevators got up that high. We weren’t even quite at the top and it was still higher than anything else in the city. Then we took the car back to the airport and were surprised to have lounge access at one of the lounges in our terminal! We didn’t think we were going to. The food at the lounge is really good… and onto Kuwait for the night!

Our flight was only a little eventful… the guy with the bags at the beginning [he was upset because there wasn’t enough room for his many shopping bags in the overhead bin] and then the really hard landing.

Saturday: Kuwait (Nov 9)

We walked around the city pretty much all day. We walked toward the Kuwait Towers in the morning which took us by the grand mosque, which we spent a while sitting outside of in the shade reading about Islam from the Lonely Planet. We then continued on to the Ruby Tuesday near the Kuwait Towers so we could cool off a little bit. We couldn’t go into the Kuwait Towers because they are under going renovations, so we just looked from the outside. After that we spent a while longer meandering through the city (and only getting a little lost) before checking out the souq. We just walked around there a lot and then got these amazing fruit juice drinks and sat for a while to drink them. We eventually made our way back to the hotel so we could clean up and get our stuff ready (and hit up the lounge for some food!). We were taken to the airport in a BMW by a very talkative man from Bangladesh. He thought Aaron and I were married and told us to get on the kid making. lol. At the airport we had to wait for about an hour to check in, and now we are in the Dasman lounge just chilling. 

Sunday: Travel Day (Nov 10)

The day of many flights…. first was KWI to IAD. Slept pretty well for most of the flight. Aaron was making friends with the flight attendants and they gave us amenity kits! Aaron got the first class one and I got a business class one. When we landed in IAD we went through all of the customs stuff… used global entry for the first time. Aaron changed his flight to go direct from IAD to ORD, but I elected to fly the original itenerary because I want to make silver… flight from IAD to IAH (A319) was pretty uneventful. At IAH I went to the KLM lounge. That was pretty nice because they had Ms Vickie’s chips which are the best. Currently flying IAH to ORD (A319).