Breakfast in the Colonnade, then waiting in Seabourn square until the ship was ready for folks to disembark. Said good-bye to a few people we had met on board and waited with Marilynn and Mike as the ship was readied to disembark the passengers for the last time. When our group was called, we left the ship with a pair of bright pink landing cards for the United Arab Emirates and instructions for where to find our luggage.

The guide was waiting for us with a personalized sign when we emerged from the terminal. He was smiling and energetic and took us right to the car with our driver for the morning. Before leaving home, our travel agent arranged for someone to pick us up, take us on a tour of old Dubai, and drop us off at the hotel in time for lunch. We had a whirlwind tour of the old city, which is not really very old, seeing the gold and spice souqs, the Jumeirah Mosque, stopping for Arabic coffee and dates in a coffee house, and riding the abra, a water taxi..

The tour started with a wonderful visit to Jumeirah Mosque where a volunteer tour guide took us (and a group of 50-60 tourists) inside and spent 90 minutes explaining all about it, the significance of what we saw and answered questions. After she introduced herself and explained her goal for the visit, she offered also to answer any questions saying "No questions are off limits." The tourists did ask a lot of questions and she answered everything.

From there we went to the Dubai Museum and Al Fahidi Fort for a brief visit. We took the abra, a water taxi, across the Dubai Creek to visit the gold and spice souqs. They dropped us off at the Jumeirah Creekside Hotel shortly after 1:00. We were able to check in early and went straight to lunch at the Nomad Restaurant in the hotel.

Our evening tour started with a pick-up time of 5:30 to drive 30 minutes out of the city to the Al Sahra Desert Resort for an evening of dinner and entertainment. We arrived there just after sunset, and the location was just stunning. We were welcomed with coffee and dates again. Walking up to the outdoor restaurant, we passed a falconer with his falcon, a camel trainer offering rides, a woman doing henna tattoos, and horses to ride. Phil rode a camel and I got a henna tattoo on my hand.

We listened to the live music while we waited for the buffet to open. When it did open, we found a huge assortment and amount of food. We tried a lot of things. A few of them were familiar, but many were not. Most everything was tasty.

The entertainment started about the time we had finished eating. We saw a fire dancer, a tannura dancer, two belly dancers, and two khaliji dancers. The whole evening is very touristy, but lots of fun. When we decided to leave and made our way to the exit of the property, a woman at the exit asked for our names so she could call our driver to come get us. I thought we were going to have to try to find him in the parking lot so this was a nice touch.

When we were driving out to the Al Sahra Resort, we took a couple of major highways to get away from town and to the site. When we were speeding down an eight-lane highway with very little traffic, the driver announced that we were coming up on the place. He pulled over to the side of the highway and turned onto a dirt road right off the highway. There were no entry and exit ramps on the highway. When we left we did have to turn back on the highway away from the direction we needed to go. We could not cross it at that point, but went a couple of miles down to a roundabout to make the u-turn.

Back at the hotel, we are tired but definitely enjoyed all that we got in to do today.