Entry #11 Beautiful Oman

So we made it back from our first trip outside Kuwait. We left for Muscat, Oman on September 30th and arrived home on October 5th. It was a busy five days but well worth it. We stayed with Lee, Randi and their little boy Joe (Jamie and I have known Lee since High School). They were incredibly generous and great hosts. It was great chatting about old friends and places but also nice to learn new things about the Middle East and more specifically Oman.

We spent a few days at the beach and did some shopping in the Muscat Souk (market). We visited the Grand Mosque and were blown away by its beauty. Lee and Randi have a backyard so we played outside with the kids and enjoyed some drinks there as well. One day we borrowed Lee's car for the day and went on a road trip. We went to a town a few hours outside Muscat called Nizwa to a market and fort there. A few of the highlights of that day are;

1) Me tripping in a gas station parking lot and rolling across the ground. I have a substantial bruise on my leg and some nice scraps on my arms to remember that moment. Jamie seemed to get a good laugh at my expense.

2) Us driving, for what seemed like hours, to get to the top of this mountain on a WINDY, STEEP, DIRT road and realizing at the top that we were going to run out of sunlight so we spent 15 minutes at the top and then headed back down the mountain. When we got to the bottom Jamie was relieved that no one got car sick...five minutes later Isaac threw up.

3) Getting stuck in traffic coming back through Nizwa and having to hear Zoe say for the 1 millionth time "I don't want to go on an e-venture. I want to watch Finding Nemo!"

4) Filling up a Shell station just outside Nizwa and learning after we filled up that they didn't accept VISA and realizing we had no Omani money. It was a tense 15 minutes with me near tears in the parking lot, Zoe yelling from the backseat she wanted to watch Finding Nemo, Jamie trying to convince the guy to take 10 Kuwaiti Dinars and Isaac smelling like vomit. The 10 Kuwaiti Dinars would have been more than enough to cover the cost but the gas station attendent didn't believe us. There was talk of the police and leaving our IDs to come back the next day to pay. Finally, a family pulled up at the next pump and asked what was going on and they phoned someone to find out that 10 KD was indeed enough to cover the cost of the gas. Everyone was happy and off we went in our borrowed car smelling of vomit.

Looking back it makes for a great story; not so funny at the time.

Here are some pictures. I hope they capture the beauty of Oman. The first two are of our crazy road trip and the last three our of the Grand Mosque in Muscat.