The desert, it is large

No pics from Oman. Yet. Be patient, grasshopper.

Meanwhile, a word about the Empty Quarter.

Most of it, as far as I can tell, is in Saudi Arabia. It is a vast place. Vast and, you might have guessed, quite empty. So empty, in fact, that a huge meteor blew up a chunk of it a while back in an explosion big enough to have obliterated a medium-sized city... but no one noticed until the crater was discovered decades later. True story.

Just before Thanksgiving, we stayed at a hotel about 10 kilometers into the UAE's bit of the Empty Quarter. The place was called Qasr al Sarab, which means Mirage Palace (roughly) and it really is in the middle of nowhere. So much so that if you set off walking in most directions, you would die of thirst before you even saw another living thing that wasn't a scruffy looking bush.

Here's a view from the hotel:

That pool of water? It's manmade.*

So. In short, it was a trip. Majestic dunes, absolute desolation. Of course, it's a lot easier to be awed by such things when you're sitting poolside with a mojito.

*No, I didn't take the picture. But I was with the people who did.