Yanbu - Scuba Diving in the Red Sea

On December 26th, early in the morning, we flew from Dammam to Riyadh, Riyadh to Yanbu. Took us all day to get there, but was well worth it!

The Dammam airport is suuuuper ghetto. Can you tell by the ginormous fuzzy computer screens?

 

 Fatbooth iTouch Ap - made the layovers so much better!

Airplane:

 

One of the coolest sunsets ever, from the airplane. You can clearly see every color in the rainbow. Awesome.

 Hotel Radisson Blu - First night.

Bob didn't let go of that Kindle the entire Christmas break. Except to play with my iTouch.

 

Taylor  on his iPhone, Bob on her Kindle, Ramz is sitting across from Bob on her laptop and I'm taking the picture with my iTouch. Too funny not to take a picture.

The hotel room looked like this after 5 minutes.

 That night,  Ramz, Taylor and I went out with Taylors' friend, Turki. He was away from KFUPM and at home, in Yanbu. We got this amazing traditional Yanbu food. Then we went to El Baik, this chicken place (like KFC) that is supposedly better than anything anywhere else in the world (or, uh, Kingdom, whatever).

In Dhahran, the Family/Women's sections are partitioned off by curtains, and only some of them have curtains. This restaurant, really had the whole professional looking partition thing down.

 Bob makes this face around Taylor a lot...

I purchased The Oregon Trail on my iTouch for .99 cents. Provided so much fun for Bob and I. Worth every penny.

We were all trying to sleep that night, Bob and I one one bed, Taylor in the other and Ramz on the floor. Ramz kept sighing and making all sorts of frustrated noises. She said the down feather pillow was accosting her face. This went on for a while. When we woke up the next morning, I saw all night she'd been picking out the offending feathers.

 We went scuba diving in the Red Sea the next day after arriving in Yanbu.

 Getting ready for the dive :

Dad, Taylor, Brandon and I did the first dive. Mom had a problem with her tank and couldn't go down with us. She sure tried, though. 

Dad and Brandon

Dad, Taylor, Mom, Me, Brandon and the scuba instructor

Mom is on the far right. I'm on the far left. Not sure on the others.

On the way to the second dive, we got caught in a pod of AT LEAST 50 dolphins. They just starting jumping out of the water all over the place. They were racing the prow of the boat and everything. It happened so fast we didn't get pictures. TRAGIC. Seriously, this has to be one of the coolest experiences of my entire LIFE. About 20 minutes later, it happened again. You'd think we would have gotten pictures this time. But, alas, nope. 

Playing around between dives:

Brandon, Taylor, Me, Bobbie

I love her face/body language in this.  I asked her later what her favorite part of our whole vacation had been. She said, "Umm... jumping off the top of the boat." 

On the dives we saw lots of fish, and incredible coral. Highlights include seeing this enormous eel in a crevice in the coral, just hanging out, and seeing a stingray.

After our second dive, the instructor took Bob out to try scuba diving. She didn't want to, but we kind of made her. For her own good, of course.

She got down about 12 feet. And then she did the signal for, "TAKE ME UP!" I'm so glad we got that on camera.