Day 10, January 1, 2025: A New Year Begins, A Journey Ends

View of Abu Dhabi from our hotel room, 9am, New Year's Day. The streets are very quiet and empty.

This is our last day of the trip. It has been a day on our own, and we decided to hang around the hotel, read, catch up on the blogposts, and otherwise relax.

After breakfast this morning, Patrise immediately went to the spa, while and set about catching up on the blog for the December 31 narrative. It was an extensive day yesterday, so I knew it would take quite a while to get the photos downloaded and the stories posted. Still, before I got into working on the blog, I went downstairs to reception, to get someone from Maintenance or Engineering to come to the room to work on the temperature setting. Since we arrived the evening of the 30th until this morning, we had not been abel to get the thermostat to respond to produce a warmer temperature in the room. We got extra blankets last night and even with that and sleeping with a sweatshirt over my pajamas, I was barely able to stay comfortable. After making my request at reception, I went to the Starbucks on the ground floor to get a coffee.

By the time I returned from Starbucks, the engineer was waiting for me. The first and only fix to the problem was to turn the system completely off. As he determined, the temperature setting was not responding. So when in doubt, take the modern approach to technology: reboot. That is what he did. He said the room would warm up and eventually the system would turn on again, at which time, it should respond to any efforts to increase the room temperature. I was hoping that would be the case. In the meantime, I worked on the blog, while the room did eventually warm up to a bearable temperature.

As I worked away on the blog, Patrise enjoyed a facial and a 1-1/2 hour full body massage. When she finished, she asked me to bring her purse up to the salon/spa floor so that she could pay for the services. When I did that, it was after 3:30 in the afternoon, so we decided to walk the streets of Abu Dhabi once more and find a restaurant for lunch. We walked about two blocks from the hotel, then wandered down a side street. There were two restaurants there -- the Al Arab and the Manila Bakery and Cafe. I opted for the Al Arab and it was a great choice. Here's how the restaurant advertises its cuisine:

We ordered soup -- Chinese corn soup for her, lentil soup for me -- mango lassis to drink, better naan for bread, then a new dish for us to split, king fish mandi. All of it was very good and flavorful. The waiter seemed delighted to serve us, because we were from another country and enjoyed talking to us, albeit somewhat limited because of our respective language barriers.

Here are some more photos from today, from the morning to the evening...

We walked back to the hotel, stopped at the reception desk to order breakfast boxes to take in the morning, then returned to our room and started packing. We will leave the hotel at 3am tomorrow morning to return to the Dubai airport. The other travelers have a flight to New York about 6 or 6:30am. Our flight is not until 9:45am, but there is only one free shuttle, so we will be on it.

This is the final blogpost from our trip to the United Arab Emirates in the holiday season of 2024. Over the next few days, Patrise and I will likely add some final thoughts and observations about the trip. For those who have followed our stories and pictures, we hope you have enjoyed all of it, Be sure to offer your feedback, including your questions. You can send them through the blog platform or email us directly.

Thanks be to God for another incredible journey!