Roadtrip to Oman

This weekend we hired a car for a road trip to Oman. 'Road trip' also being code for Visa Run. Our 30 day visitors visa's are about to expire and Naz and Piper will not receive their residency papers for another week.

The closest point of Oman is a 2 hour drive from Dubai. Rather than just drive 2 hours get our stamps and u-turn back over the border we decided to do some exploring and make an adventure out of the trip.

The UAE-Oman border is on a mountain line and is an amazing region. It was a beautiful change of landscape to the constant sand desert surrounding Dubai. We had planned on advice from friends to drive into the mountains to finds some wadi's (natural spring rock pools) for an afternoon of swimming. However as we had hired a sedan and not a 4WD we changed our minds on seeing the area and will leave that for another trip.
Instead we explored a beautiful town called Hatta and visited Hatta Fort and the Heritage Village.
The landscape and mountains were breathtaking and the locals extremely friendly. Perhaps too friendly as we naively followed a super friendly gentleman's instruction on where to go for a walk to a natural spring and gardens only to have him pop up on us and insist we go with him to his shanty for a drink of water..... very awkward moments followed once we got there as we didn't want to offend his kindness but there was no way we were going inside that building.
Below are some photograph's from our little'road trip'. We can't wait to drive the 5 hours to the capital of Oman, Muscat sometime in the next few months.

Never ending sand. We couldn't get a photo as we were driving but we saw literally 100's of camels during our drive roaming the sand dunes on the side of the road.

Ummm show your passports?

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Birthday Celebrations!

Last week I celebrated my 32nd birthday and thanks to our shipping container arriving at 8pm the night before and Naz and I not going to bed until everything was in order we got to have our first day of relaxing and fun in our new home!

Piper is terrible at secrets and had already informed me during the week that she was making me a birthday cake all by herself and she had hidden my presents under her bed. I also overheard her telling her Dad exactly what colour balloons she needed and insisting they go to Dubai Mall for party hats.
However what she did not blab about was my fabulous birthday present.... a brand new Canon SLR camera and lots of great acccessories!
So of course I snapped away all day like a mad woman but it is honestly going to take me another year to get the hang of this thing so excuse some of the photo's.
Below are my favourite snaps from my birthday.....

Walking to get a coffee from our favourite place. Burj Khalifa is in the background, Old Town island on the right and our apartments on the left.

Beautiful gluten free cupcakes which as you can see Piper iced all by herself and decorated.... apparently these few cupcakes took 3 packets of fun size smarties, you can only guess where the missing smarties went!

For dinner we went to my favourite Thai restaurant Tip Thara which I have been to on my previous Dubai work trips. It is in the 'Old Town - Palace' complex across the water from our house and is built over the water looking directly at the nightly water fountain show in front of the Burj Khalifa.
This photo is Piper being spoilt by the staff who insisted on feeding her.

A new house and a little fun in the snow!

Yes we finally have a house!! What an experience that was.... lots of shonky agents and not enough nice 'clean' properties!
We have rented an apartment in the Burj Residences which is directly on the fountain lake (we would call it a pool in Oz)that surrounds the Burj Khalifa, Old Town and Dubai Mall. We have 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, maids quarters and a massive open plan lounge, dining, kitchen with a good sized balcony. We chose the building for the facilities and proximity to everything.... we are thinking we will no longer need a car in such a hurry!! Our building has a large pool, kids pool, playgrounds (one outside and one indoors), gym centre and squash courts. Will post some photo's soon.
We now just have to wait 6 more sleeps til we can move in..... providing our visa's are complete so we can have utilities connected and they will release our container from the docks but that is another story.

To celebrate finally having a day to relax and breathe we took Piper on an adventure to Ski Dubai at Mall of the Emirates (15 min taxi ride from our new home). Finally Piper's incredible talking ability came in handy and we convinced them she was 3 years old!

It turns out our bub is quite the dare devil and has a need for speed (the Poppie gene in her I think). We thought she would hate it but Naz threw her in the rubber tube and pushed her down the toboggon run where I was waiting to catch her at the bottom. I was waiting for tears but instead was greeted with "more more", "faster faster" as you will see below.
Take off

See Mum, told you I would be fine!

Well I am back in the office from today (my work week is Sunday - Thursday) so who know what adventures Naz and Piper are going to get up to this week to escape the hotel.
It feels a million miles from home today, I logged onto Facebook and read some local Melbourne news online only to be greeted by lots of status updates and news about Spring Racing Carnival and Bathurst! Hope you all had a great weekend xo

We have arrived!!

We have arrived safe and sound! Piper was an angel and slept for 10 hours on the plane, in fact she was asleep straight after take-off and I wasn't far behind.

After the horrific Melbourne weather that farewelled us on Thursday it was somewhat of a shock to the system to be greeted in Dubai by 37 degrees at 5am in the morning. Overnight lows at the moment are low 30's with mid 40's during the day.

We are slowly finding our feet. We all woke yesterday morning at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep so we decided to beat the heat and take a nice long walk around the Burj Kahlifa and Old Town at 5am to start our day.
Of course Piper was not going to let her first day pass without a big swim in the pool. She causes somewhat of a scene as she is so confident in the water she happily swims around the pool with her life vest on without holding on to one of us. Then when she thinks she is losing the attention of the crowd she clambers onto the edge of the pool to loudly sing Humpty Dumpty and jump in the pool!

Thank you again to everybody for your farewell wishes and apologies to those we did not get to see in person to say goodbye xo

Piper and Stella

During our final week in Australia we stayed with my family in the country and Piper got to spend some precious playtime with her cousin Stella who was visiting from Sydney!

A visit to the Koala Park at Phillip Island

A belated celebration for Stella's 2nd birthday