Day 3: Arrival at Wadi Rum!

March 3: Once again, breakfast was at 7:00 with the intention of hitting the trail by 8:00. Nothing new or exciting to report there, but it was a beautiful day for hiking with clear, blue skies--warm, but not hot.

It didn't take long before we arrived at the marvelous red sandstone formations of Wadi Rum. Much if it reminded me of the terrain in southern Utah or northern Arizona, as if they were distant cousins.

Wadi Rum is probably best known for being used as a backdrop in countless movies. Lawrence of Arabia is perhaps the best well-known, but it's stark, reddish landscape makes it a popular location for alien planets like The Martian and a couple of the Star Wars movies (Rogue One and the upcoming Rise of the Skywalker coming out in December). Even the new live-action version of Aladdin--in theaters now!--had scenes filmed at Wadi Rum. (The trailers for both Rise of the Skywalker and Aladdin include scenes clearly recognizable as Wadi Rum.)

In any case, the views were jaw-dropping and amazing. It felt very much like we could have been walking through some sort of alien planet. Small flowers dotted the landscape, and locals told us it was the best wildflower display they've had in years because of the unusually wet winter this past year.

If it doesn't look like an alien landscape, then you aren't in Wadi Rum!

The day's hike was relatively short as well, partly because we split the extra miles we did from day 1 into shorter days for days 2 and 3, and partly because it was relatively short to be begin with. We arrived at camp at around 1:00 in the afternoon so had plenty of time to relax and explore the area. We arrived so early, in fact, that the support crew hadn't finished setting up the tents!

I took an orange and drew a face on it with my colored pens, then decided to take the other dozen plus oranges that had been set out to snack on and draw on them as well. I enlisted Karolina to help but she only drew a couple of them and left the rest up to me.

In camp, we also had showers! Heated water was poured into some sort of pressurized container that could be used to take a brief shower in a small tent. Karolina gave it a try but after only three days on the trail, I didn't feel dirty enough to bother. Not yet, at least!

Shortly before sunset, several of us decided to go out and explore the area, which we did taking some wonderful photos with the alpenglow before wandering back to camp for the rest of the night.

Definitely a pleasant and wonderful day on the trail!

There aren't a lot of trees out here, and when you find one, everyone likes to rest under it for the shade!

While walking to camp, we saw our support vehicles drive past us moving everything to our new campsite.

It was about here when I realized that we were going somewhere very special today!

I jokingly called this petrified poop! I'm pretty sure it's not (there was way too much of it in the area), but it kind of looks like it could be, don't you think?

I'd go to extraordinary lengths to get a good photo!

This was the photo I was taking in the last photo.

I called this the spaghetti plant because I thought it looked like pasta noodles. =)

What a lovely place to camp!

I drew a face on my first orange....

...then I couldn't stop and had to draw faces on all of them!

Camp shower!

Lots of flowers in the desert! Small flowers, but flowers nonetheless!

Camel prints are huge!