Camping at Jebel Shams

If she looks calm, she's not. She cried and she screamed and she got mad. She wanted to be able to do it and she didn't realize how hard you have to work to learn things sometimes and even though Alena was overly patient with her, she just about lost her mind. I guess that will make a good Family Home Evening Topic. Some things require WORK, EFFORT, PATIENCE and TIME. We had a 3 1/2 hr drive to the camping spot and our car was PACKED. We're REALLY missing our Stecherbus. HOWEVER, Stecherbus couldn't climb that mountain so there's that.

These are the Bywater girls, the younger 2. Our girls had such a lovely time playing, exploring and singing with them.

Brigham and I climbed one side of the Jebel Friday evening to see what we could see. We saw remains of terraced gardening across the whole of the mountain, we saw some cisterns as the kids love to call them, we saw many goats.

The girls made a fort/club/hide out in that group of thorny trees. They spent a lot of time in there including hours of singing at night and the next day. Most of the video I took is too long but there's one that loaded at the end of this post.

Sunset visit from some goats. They didn't really bother us too much. We see goats everywhere, all the time here, but we don't really see humans connected to them. Well, that night before dark a couple of humans walked these mountains calling their goats and the goats came.

Our Sennia, up with the sun, was the only one to join us for a sunrise hike to the other side of the mountains where there's a precipice that drops down into the "Grand Canyon of Oman". You could see the trail of the Balcony Walk we did a couple of months ago.

There was definitely a love of beetles theme to the camping trip. The girls loved these very long legged beetles that I should've gotten a picture of and they caught them and put them in rock homes to try and keep them. Samuel really wanted to stay up all night and see what he could coax in with his light trap but it was incredibly cold that night-45! and no beetle in his right mind came out to see his light.  We made tin foil breakfasts that morning.

The goats came first thing in the morning to clean up the remains of our grilled pineapple and breakfast.

You can't see the trail but the balcony walk is down on the side of this mountain.

This little old man had only a few teeth and serious cataracts or eye disease. He was wandering around, saying hello. There was a woman who looked very similar, same glazed eyes and few teeth, who was selling bracelets. We didn't have a lot of small bills but we bought a couple and gave her some of our breakfast. It's a hard life to carve out of the rock of those mountains. There seem to be little privileges for those elderly. They really asked for nothing, I think it's illegal here maybe. But they were also so kind, so friendly. Interested in our kids. We got to practice our Arabic greetings and goodbyes. It was a good trip, a good reset even though it was short and our children who are getting rather large, were crammed into 7 seats we had left after all the camping gear.