Our first sighting? These sand gazelles. They were pretty close, but I didn't want to scare them off by clomping onto the beach, so I took these from the water. They are all over the place here.
So now I'll get to the "I've fallen and I can't get up..." part. I've known for awhile that there's an island in Abu Dhabi where you can find ostriches. Who knew? They're fenced in, but the only way I know of to get there is by jet ski or kayak, so I've never taken photos until today. We pull our jet skis up onto the beach, I get off and start walking in water about 18 inches deep. My foot sinks into the sand, and I'm stuck almost to my knee. I fell down, ever so gracefully, onto my backside, and I swear I couldn't get my foot out of the sand. I seriously had to call my husband over and have him help me. I think he kind of shook his head in awe, but I may have just imagined that. Anyway, by the time I got myself out, I realized that had a parked on the other side of my husband, there wasn't that kind of sand, and I could have just walked out of the water like a normal person. Instead, I was all graceful and amazing. You're welcome, honey.
Anyway, I only got one shot of an ostrich. Mainly because he was outside of the fence. And he was walking toward us. And my husband said he'd heard those things are mean. All of the others that were behind the fence ran away when we got there. Not this guy. Instead of being able to walk up to the fence and take photos of the 25 or so that I saw, I had to take one of this crazy thing, and then get back to the jet ski. Fun times.
This is just a panoramic shot of Yas Island, taken from the dock where we keep the jet skis. My sweet date was being awesome, and he wouldn't let me help with any of the cleaning or anything, so I just played around with the camera.
Didn't even get a date night selfie of us, but here he is in cleaning mode.
I had a really good time, despite the fact that we had to change our initial plan because of the tide. Totally not a typical date night, but so, so fun.
