Camping on Jabal Shams

Mid-May camping trip: the only place to go is up the mountain where you hope it will be a bit cooler. Supposedly 10 degrees C cooler. That means instead of it being around 45 C (113 F) it should have been highs of about 35 C (95 F). It was still hot, but we had fun. And since this was 1 of Jon's 3 weekends between semesters of school we took the only opportunity we had to go.

Here we are heading out

We had literally just gotten on the road when it was time to pull out snacks. It took a bit longer to pack then we had hoped. But we enjoyed a good night sleep the night before (that's crucial to a good camping trip when you won't sleep much in the tent and will wake up with the sun!)

An old abandoned village on the way up the mountain. By the way, Jabal Shams means Mountain of the sun in Arabic. It's the tallest mountain in Oman.

When we got up high enough to have cooler temps we put the windows down. Elie loved it. Joey had finally fallen asleep.

Elie found the fruit and helped herself to an apple. This was one of the first times she's had an apple to just bite off of rather than sliced. Tons easier!

Notice goat in the background. This is one of many that hung out around our campsite.

Josiah & Layla will climb anything you let them.

Two hot kids.

One extremely happy kid!

Feeding the goats the watermelon rinds. They would have had them anyway because they kept getting into our trash bags. I thought Jon was going to take the rinds a bit farther away but I think he was mobbed & didn't have a chance.

We celebrated Ryan's 1st birthday. Hard to believe I was at the hospital with Steph just a year ago.

Notice donkey in picture... He wasn't quite as obtrusive as the goats.

Early morning walk on the last day. We were awake anyway and it was cooler at 6:30 AM

Joey took this one. Not too bad.

Random camel

We tried to break up the trip home with a little excursion. And though we still had food we didn't want to eat lunch in the car and needed somewhere to "picnic." Too bad we had come back down the mountain into the heat on the hottest day of the year so far at that time.

So here's our excursion "Bee hive" tombs.

The sand and dirt was hot. The rock was hotter. But since we stopped we weren't going to skip it. We found a tiny bit of shade to sit under on the hot rock and ate our lunch quickly then hiked up to the tombs. We didn't read far enough in the guide book where it said you had to hike to get to the tombs before we got there.

Joey went inside. I think it was pretty hot in there too. There was a sign that said not to disturb anything. Maybe I shouldn't be admitting that he went in!

This is the hike back down to our car sitting in the wadi. Our lunch shade was one of the trees on the right, maybe slightly bigger than what you see in the pic, but not much.

I think we made memories on this excursion but I'm not sure it was fun.