Friday Flashback – December Camping trip Part 1

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In December we went for a week long camping trip to some interesting places here in Arabia. I was on my blog break then, but really still want to share these photos and our trip with you, so I’ll be doing some Friday Flashbacks in the next few months just for the fun of it!

I have been wanting to do this trip for a while, because it was to explore the old Hejaz Railway. This is a railway that was built by the Turks to carry pilgrims from Damascus to Medina for their pilgramage to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. A bit of history for you here, but bear with me… 🙂 It was completed in 1908, but didn’t have a very long life span because of Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab Revolt during the First World War. (Exciting stuff, eh?!)

There is not much left of the railway now in Arabia. Time and sand has blown much of it away, but there are still many stations and Turkish forts left to see and this is what the first part of our trip was about.

We headed out early morning, the menfolk having packed most of the car the night before, and the rest that morning:

With five people camping for a week it was rather full!

We then met up with two other cars and started on our journey west. All of the driving that first day was on the highway. Dh had looked on Google Earth to see if he could find a nice camping spot where we could stop at the end of the day. He found an outcrop of rocks that looked good – hopefully quiet and secluded. So we headed for that area, and  got there just before sunset.

When we turned off the highway and started heading in to the “hopefully quiet and secluded” prospective camping spot, we found this instead:

A whole bunch of locals driving around looking for a nice picnic spot!! There were even some people out exercising their horses:

As we were watching the horses playing, some cars stopped to watch the foreigners watching the horses… and one friendly guy stopped to chat and warn us not to camp too far away from the road because of the “wolves”….. hmmmm….. we ignored that comment and kept on driving into the rocks and past all the families having picnics. As we drove further in we finally came to the quiet areas where most of the cars could not go (because they weren’t four wheel drives). But the next problem we had was finding a not so rocky spot to set up camp because this is what it looked like:

Just before the sun went down we managed to find a spot and set up camp:

We had bbq for dinner….

and an early night….. and we didn’t notice any wolves.. if they did visit, we were fast asleep….

More next week!