Out in the middle of the desert, several countries huddle together to form a peninsula out to the sea, Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia are some of them. One of the countries is the United Arab Emirates, and in that country, there is a large city called Dubai, which we are in now. Dubai hosts the world’s tallest building, and a lot of smaller ones, too. There is a beach and a marina and several malls. We are staying in the Hilton on the beach. The largest mall in the world is here in Dubai, too, it is called the Dubai Mall.

Last evening, we got into our plane after solving the rental car crisis that broke out because we crashed the car in the last 5 hours. We had planned to go up Table Mountain that day, but there were too many people so we turned around and went back home. At a corner, we went at the same time that someone else went another direction and collided. That was annoying. After playing putt-putt, we left and headed to the airport. From there we flew to Johannesburg and from there to Dubai on a long overnight flight where I got little sleep.

Today, after watching the sunrise from the plane window, we disembarked from the plane and went through all the necessary paperwork and such before heading to our hotel. The hotel had messed up our reservations so we had to wait an hour to get into our rooms. After a shower and a change of clothes, we went to the Mall of the Emirates, where there is the largest indoor ski resort on the planet. Eryn and I skied a lot. There were two ways of getting up the slope; one was going on a standard lift, and the other was hanging on to a metal bar connected to a moving cable and riding up-hill by being dragged. The slopes themselves were cool, at the top there was some easy stuff, and then there was a fork in the road with a café in the middle. If you went left, facing down, you would go down a blue square, or moderate difficulty, run before arriving at the bottom of the lift. At some point of time in that, you could cut off and go on the half-pipe. If you had gone right at the fork, you would go down fairly steep stuff before it leveled out and arrived back at the bottom. It was really fun. I did all that I told you, but the one thing that I didn’t do was go on a trick course because I prefer downhill skiing, not flying skiing.

That’s all for now, Folks!