UAE to Jordan Day 4 – 13 Feb 23 Monday

A super quiet night and not as cold as I thought it would be. It was cold, but the pod is fairly warm even without the diesel heater being kicked into action. I think might need to get some diesel and try it out though.

Drive to Hail

Bruce the Jeep is doing ok though, I do feel we are rushing. I would love to slow down a little bit, but we put together a challenging plan for this journey to really test ourselves. We are on a strict plan for this adventure and we need to eat the kilometers. It should be noted we are not the fastest on the road and we may cheer when we pass a sports or fancier car, but think we could drop to lorry speed and we will see more and put less strain on Bruce. It might relax us too! We limit ourselves to 100kph which

 

6am in KSA

It is 6am right now and today we need to head to alula which is supposed to be amazing. The concern is the route takes rather longer than expected. 

The plan we meticulously put together did not last too long on the road and we have found errors throughout. Seems crazy really as from your desk in the comfortable Villa you think you have it planned to a detail, but on the road and doing it, it falls apart with wrong coordinates, distances, times and generally misinformation about the place. Well they say that plans do not survive first contact with the enemy. My philosophy is eat the elephant one bite at a time!

When we pulled up to the camp spot yesterday we had 50km range left in Bruce the Jeep, so this morning we shall top up with the Jerry cans and see what range we get with two cans. A good exercise to do and it we hope to top back up in Haʼil حَائِل in the North-western Saudi Arabia. It is the capital and largest city of Ha’il Region. There are plenty of fuel stations and more than I thought reading some of the overland stories of Saudi Arabia. That said, you must have a spare can for sure as there are plenty of abandoned stations to and that last leg was a long one. I would also say it it nice to have a spare can for that other unfortunate soul that you pass on the side of the road.