Well let's see here, my flight was absurdly long.  I started out flying from San Jose to Denver.  This really doesn't get you closer to the UAE.  I made the mistake of mentioning the San Jose airport and I think that organizer thought they were doing me a favor by flying me from there versus San Francisco.  So instead of me driving 45 min to San Fran, I flew 2 1/2  hours to Denver and then had a 3 hour lay over to fly to Europe.  I walked around Denver switched my watch by an hour and had a salad.  This added 5 hours to my lovely trip.  Then I got on my flight to Frankfurt.  This was a 10:35 flight.  I switched my watch by 8 hours and walked around all of the Duty Free shopping there was to see and waited out my 3 hour lay over.  Then I boarded my final leg to Dubai.  This was a 5:55 flight.  I changed my watch by 3 more hours and was there.  I landed at 11:55 pm.  I took off on the 5th of Feb at 11 am and landed the 6th at 11:55 pm.  Very cool time warp. 

Once I was through passport control, which took about an hour, I went to baggage.  After finding my bags, which were the last two to appear (at least they appeared though, right?) I went out to look for a person holding my name on a sign.  I looked and then looked and then realized there wasn't a sign...shit.  I had emailed the person in charge of our travel arrangements 5 times leading up to this trip to get the hotel info and never had gotten any data.  Luckily at one point Jeremy had mentioned the hotel name to me and I was familiar with the hotel from a previous trip.  I called the hotel to see what was happening and they informed me that I should take a cab and that it would be paid by the hotel.  Cool.  I quickly got into a cab.  It was now past 1 am.

I told the cab where to go and he drove off with certainty, for about an hour.  Then he asked me where we were going.  I wanted to kill him.  He was very cheerful and I was very tired.  I told him again and he said he would call a friend to get directions.  I was thinking, why not call the hotel?  Or better yet why not enter the address into the shiney new GPS that he had?  We drove for a long time.  He pulled over three times and flagged down random drivers to ask if they knew where the hotel was.  Very disturbing at this hour.

I finally made it to the hotel after 2:30 am.  The trip wasn't long until I landed!  To think that they could have flown me into Abu Dhabi, which is 15 min from the hotel, but that would have ruined the fun. Oh and I wasn't the only one having fun, poor Erin Rapp got to the hotel after 5:30 am from Dubai as well!

Jeremy ran this morning while I walked Smitty.  I really thought that I would soak in the warm sun here, it rained today!!  We saw two cars with broken axles from sliding out and hitting curbs!

After lunch we went back to the barn (the barn is open for certain hours in the am, then closes and reopens in the afternoon.) and Jeremy and Ellen rode.  Erin and I practiced handing off bottles to them.  The hardest part was chasing down the bottle after the hand off as the wind was so strong.  We ran around after bottles laughing.  This is an extremely funny process if you haven't slept!

We went to the hotel and went in the Very hot, hot tub and then waited for dinner.  Ellen, Erin, Jeremy and I ate (well, sort of, Jeremy is slimming down to be closer to the 165 weight minimum and he has lost about 15 pounds since arriving here, so he didn't eat much) and now it is time for sleep.

Heather