So you’ve probably seen or at least heard of the Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman movie called Bucket List. I don’t officially have a bucket list however every time I do something out of the ordinary I make a reference like “well I get to check that off my bucket list.” Two things get checked off as of today – riding a quad bike across the sand dunes in the Arabian desert and riding a camel. Wow – just being able to write that makes me a little choked up. Thanks Dennis and Christy for making this adventure of a lifetime possible.

I’ll start with the quad bikes. It’s a good thing my brother has done this before and knew the lay of the land. The one thing he warned me about was being careful about driving to the top of a large dune without knowing how steep the other side was. What’s about the first thing I did – ride to the top of a STEEP dune. I tried to back up but couldn’t so then I thought I could just take it really easy and traverse sideways down this incredibly steep dune. The bike almost tipped over on top of me before I got it stuck. Dennis dug it out and the bike just started sliding down the dune, without me on it. So it stopped at the bottom of the dune, Dennis and I trudged through the sand to get to it. Lesson learned. And I’m pretty sure being buried alive in sand would be a horrible way to die. Other than that, it was blast. And the views from the top were incredible of the Arabian Sea. Check out the photos on Facebook.

Now for camels. I certainly understand the important role they play in this desert culture, but they are just weird. And it’s weird to drive along the highway and see camels where cows would be in our country. So I rode a camel – just a short ride because they don’t use saddles in the context I’ve known. They use blankets and they provide little protection from that bone that runs between and along the top of the humps. Camels are taller than horses, a lot taller. Getting on one isn’t that tough. The tough part is when the camel sits down after the ride. If you don’t have a tight handle, you could easily fall forward off the strange animal. I can now say I’ve done it, I’ve ridden a camel, and it’s something I only need to do once. We also drove through the camel souk (shop) on our way back to town today. Just so you know, camels are all different colors from light beige to black. Babies are born with the humps and they’re kind of cute – for camels. Camels are used for utilitarian purposes and the really expensive ones with superior DNA are used at the camel races. I’m just not sure how you tell which camels are meant for racing and which ones are meant for hauling your crap.

After a mellow afternoon, we head out this evening for one of Dennis and Christy’s friends 30th birthday. We’ll be dining at La Spaghetto’s tonight. It’s Italian, in case you couldn’t tell. One thing about Qatar is that they don’t really have their own stuff, other than vast supplies of natural gas and oil. They don’t have a food specialty other than mint lemonade and just about everything you can think of is imported from another country, especially our country. The American influence is everywhere including Burger King and Papa John’s. They refer to barber shops as saloons – I think they mean salon, but what harm does an extra “o” really do?

One of our afternoon activities was a taste test of three different types of bacon – my sister-in-law is preparing a feast tomorrow night and one of the recipes calls for crumbled bacon. So we cooked beef bacon – kind of like jerky – and two types of turkey bacon. The Everyday Butterball brand was the best. They seem to be pretty adept at creating pork-like products but I know my bacon and know matter what you try to do, there’s no substitute for the REAL thing.

It’s hard to believe tomorrow is my final day here. It has been a real hoot!