Merry Belated Christmas. I got you a blog.

Hey remember me? I know, I know. Even taking into account the work factor, it’s been a longer break than usual (or possibly ever). Reminder: I was in Abu Dhabi working on the UAE's National Day show, which I’ve done twice before, in 2018 and 2015. (Shortest job re-cap ever: It was fine.) Then I was in London for a grand total of six days - just long enough to bail out the boat (not kidding), swap shorts and t-shirts for scarves and gloves in my suitcase, and do a quick blitz of Christmas shopping. Then six days in Winnipeg visiting. And now Saskatoon for Christmas. There. All caught up.

I did think I’d manage to get at least one other Abu Dhabi blog post up before work go to be too much. I even sought out a touristy destination and took lots of pictures and notes and then promptly did no further blogging of any sort. I blame the fact that we were on a six day work week, which meant that the seventh day was mostly consumed with life admin like buying groceries and doing laundry and general self care (mostly napping and eating pop-tarts for lunch while sitting mesmerised by endless YouTube videos of van life and tiny houses.) Life, you know? It’s what happens in between blogs.

Qasr Al Watan. Also known as the Presidential Palace. It was pretty. I didn’t blog about it.

I do love this work, and I'm amazed that people continue to pay me to live in interesting places and work on the largest shows on the planet. But the lifestyle comes with sacrifices and one of those is that it can be hard to maintain something like a normality when you live in a hotel, get up in the morning, and sit at the hotel breakfast buffet with your work colleagues. Then get on the shuttle bus with your work colleagues. Then you spend your twelve hour work day with your work colleagues. Then get back on the shuttle bus with the same people to go “home”. And then maybe go for a drink in the hotel bar with… everyone from work. Then rinse and repeat the next day for four months. The people that do these shows are lovely, brilliant, and amazing and I’m lucky to call them not just colleagues but friends. But honestly, I do not need to be with them 16 hours a day. Love ya, but please go away.

One of the things I do to mitigate this is to eat breakfast in my room, which makes life feel a lot more normal. And because I was in town for twice as long as I have been before, I connected with the Abu Dhabi branch of the Hash House Harriers, who have always been my go-to solution for helping get out of the work bubble. As ever, the Abu Dhabi Hash was full of friendly, crazy, like-minded people who welcomed me to the club and gave me a social group outside of work, which can be more precious than all the pop-tarts in the world.

My first run with the Abu Dhabi Hash was only a few days after I arrived, in mid-August. It will not surprise Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers to learn that August in Abu Dhabi is, and I’m going to be indelicate here, fucking hot. I was not surprised by this. What did surprise me was the humidity. It’s supposed to be the desert right? How can it be so humid? I remember arriving at the airport late in the evening and walking out of the overly air-conditioned terminal straight into a wall of damp heat, and being consumed with hysterical laughter. I think my driver was a bit alarmed but I couldn’t help it. It was just so ridiculous think that people were expected to exist in those conditions. Indonesia, yeah. Indonesia should be humid. It’s basically a jungle. But Abu Dhabi? Whaaaaat?

Still, on the first Monday I was in Abu Dhabi I dutifully hopped in a taxi and made my way to the start point of that week’s run, the middle of a giant, baking parking lot near the Presidential Palace. And it wasn’t long before a few brave souls arrived to make up a pack of… five. I guess even hashers have their limits. Most of them were either on vacation or not crazy enough to want to be out running in those temperatures.

Because these are not running conditions. These are conditions for making beef jerky.

Regardless, I managed to stagger around the 5k loop in a sprightly 40 minutes. Many many many walk breaks are required when “running” in those temperatures. And I was relieved that after the run we all made our way to a boat and had a lovely evening zipping around the water in the dark before mooring just off a sandy beach where we ate shawarmas and drank beer. Proper hashing!

I even managed to set my own running trail for the group while I was in town, before work got to be too much. This was nice, because setting a trail every once in a while is part of the deal, so I was glad to do it. However this did require me to go scout out the route several times in advance, meaning I was running outside even more than the once-weekly hash run. This proved challenging. I ran the trail at least three times in advance of the actual run date, just to make sure I had things figured out. And this was in mid-September when temperatures were still hovering somewhere between surface-of-the-sun and blast-furnace.

In those temperatures, any breeze might feel good. I say “might". It might also feel like you were running across a giant griddle while an enormous monster with bad breath exhaled fulsomely in your face. You might, while you were running, silently pray for the wind to stop, just for a bit. Then you might run into the lea of a large building where you were sheltered from the wind and you might then suddenly feel the full dead weight of the heat press into you and quickly decide that any breeze is better than no breeze and hasten to the next open stretch.

Yep. Running in the summer in Abu Dhabi is hard work.

However, running in the desert in November sounded like it might be a blast. By November the weather is noticeably more tolerable. It’s still hot during the day, but by evening it cools enough that it’s genuinely pleasant (as opposed to simply less awful). Sometimes you even want long sleeves. Which is why I organised my work calendar and warned my colleagues they’d have to cover for me one Saturday in early November so that I could go for the Abu Dhabi Hash House Harriers annual Rehydration Run.

Re-hy (rhyming with knee-high) sounded like a perfect day. Drive out to the desert, pitch a tent, run a trail full of themed drink stops, get back to camp in time for sunset, sit around a big campfire until all hours hanging out, drinking beer and having fun, pack up the next day and go back to work. Perfect. And because it’s the Hash, it took about three minutes before someone responded to my group WhatsApp request to borrow some camping gear, which was then delivered to me at work, and included a tent, sleeping bag and camp chair.

Setting up the tent in my living room, as a test. 

Getting to the campsite involved hitching a ride with another friendly hasher and then meeting up with a convoy of others at a gas station on the last stretch of paved road before the site. The convoy was a necessary precaution. I later learned that you basically don’t drive out into the desert by yourself because the odds of your vehicle getting stuck in the sand are so high you kind of always need a buddy to pull you out. It would be like leaving on a Christmas road trip on the prairies without jumper cables and a shovel.

Our car made it out the to the site, though several others got stuck, and the has rescue team spent a lot of time pulling cars out of the sand before we finally got around to starting the run. This left the rest of us free to set up camp, get the beer on ice, and take photos.

Of the campsite

On the haunted camel graveyard.

And here’s something that is obvious in retrospect: tent pegs do not work in the desert. Instead, tents are secured by tying them to heavy weights like plastic bags filled with the one thing you’re never going to run out of… sand. 

The other thing that is obvious in retrospect: everything you bring and every surface of your body will be completely coated in sand after approximately 4 minutes in the desert. Nothing is spared.

When we finally did get out on the trail, I contented myself with walking most (all) of the way. And how do you stop the sand getting in your shoes on a trek like that? Easy. Leave your shoes in the tent.

On the advice of those far more experienced, I walked 5k through the desert in my socks. And they were right, it was comfy and fine. Anyone who did wear shoes ended up having to stop frequently to pour out the sand anyway, and many ended the run in sock feet with their shoes hanging around their necks.

The run itself was longer than expected, and involved scaling a few wickedly high sand dunes. Happily, it was also punctuated with five different drink stops, each designed after a different TV show, which was the year’s theme.

Our first stop was ER, where we had appropriately anaesthetic libations.

Then it was on to Vikings, where we first had to negotiate with the advance raiding party.

Then on to a couple other stops, including “America’s Got Talent” (featuring a battery powered karaoke machine!) Before we got to the last stop, a golden oldie:

M*A*S*H! Complete with an IV bag of red wine.

Along the way there were ridiculously picturesque vistas

And the beginnings of a nice sunset

Once we got back to camp there was beer and food and a large bonfire. And of course there was a guy with a guitar so there was also a lot of singing including at least one loud rendition of “American Pie” and an excellent solo “Ring of Fire” by guitar guy putting on a heavy Irish accent, which gave that old standard an excellent fresh new sound. I stayed up late, sang songs, hung out, and finally made it to bed in the wee hours, very tired and completely coated in a thin layer of sand and sweat.

The next morning people roused themselves slowly and packed up. I had to be at work later that same day so when I got back to the hotel I had a bite of breakfast and one of the top three showers of my life and left the unpacking for that evening, so that I could attempt to prevent the sand from coating every surface in the room. This was marginally successful, though the hotel plumbing system must have had a bit of a shock when I finally shook everything out in the shower stall and rid my luggage of a few cups of desert sand.

So yes, I’m back. I’ll try to be a bit more regular with the blogging, though no promises about frequency (as usual). It might just be possible that after blogging more or less continuously for eleven years I’m getting just slightly burnt out. ELEVEN. YEARS. 480 posts. That’s probably about a million words. So maybe you should all count yourselves lucky that I’m still here at all, even if it’s four months between posts.

’Til next time.