For their 40th birthday’s Leah and Jennifer went to Sri Lanka on a girls trip.  Mike and I, when faced with a long weekend surrounded by children decided to go to Dubai and some theme parks.  But we never told the kids where we were going.

Mike and I managed to keep it a secret until the valet started to open the trunk to unload the bags.  For hours we had them convinced we were going to a wadi that had small rooms to stay in.  The temperature was over 40 so that would have been pretty awful.  The best part was the occasional groan from James as he contemplated the unknown…

Our hotel was great!  There was a lazy river, tons of pools, great service and food.  If reminded me of what you want when you go to an all inclusive in Mexico – except we paid for everything and the quality seemed to be higher.  Our rooms were great and whenever you turned on the TV you would get a subtle soundscape (clinking ice, pouring liquid, cutting hair etc) from one of the hotels in the chain – classy.

Attached to the hotel are three amusement parks and a water park.  The biggest is called Motiongate and has good variety of rides including some pretty intense ones – Ethan had to sit out one ride, probably for the last time in his life.  The other two theme parks are Legoland Dubai which is geared for young kids and Bollywood which is less about rides and more about the atmosphere.  The water park is also Lego themed and very well done.  Most of our time in the parks were nearly line free so in the first day we managed to hit every ride in Motiongate.  The next two days we hit the other attractions, spent time in the pool and went back for the highlight rides in Motiongate.

It was a great weekend except for the 7 hour drive home because we took an alternate non-optimized route home.

A little we got back from the park!

This attraction restored some of my faith in humanity. There were people of every color and yet pretty much everyone had the same unbridled delight when it dumped.

The indoor Legoland area needed a bit of TLC but was still pretty great.

Throughout the sets there was little bits of social commentary and bits of emotion.

Petra in Lego.

This was by far the worst execution of a good idea for a ride in the park.  We were in a “submarine” (a slow moving windowed room that is on rails in a 8 foot deep pool) and as crew we must help with the exploration of the ocean. Then danger strikes and we are supposed to hit specific buttons on the wall to previous calamity, however this quickly turned into a frenzy of “smack every button you have because they do nothing anyway.”  A bit of imaginative writing and a slight tweak to the design of the sub would have fixed it.

The theatre in Bollywood park. There was almost no one in the park and we just walked onto every ride.

Relaxing after a long days “work”.

The drive home was a bit sandy. Looked like snow on the road during a storm.  This was right outside of Dubai.  It must be super dusty living there.

The high class restaurant we had lunch at after crossing back into Oman.  The facade was great but the inside was standard haphazard layout, bad bathroom, old/worn furniture and uninspired menu.

Reminds me of “China man’s hat” in Hawaii