Travel Day: Anchorage, Ak to Dubai, UAE

Ty surprised me for our 10 year anniversary with an adults only crazy trip to Dubai, Sri Lanka, and Qatar! He apparently was planning this for ten months and I had no idea. The itinerary is one day in Dubai, seven days in Sri Lanka, and one day in Doha, Qatar. With about 24s of travel time on either end. I’m order to make this happen we also got some major grandparent help to stay with the kiddos. So thankful for this time!

We left Anchorage at 6pm on Wednesday, flew 3+ hours to Seattle. Walked directly onto our flight to Newark. That was five hours. We had a four hours we wasted in a lounge, playing cards. Before we boarded our business class seats on Emirates Airlines.

We never fly business class but oh my goodness it was so nice to stretch out during the 13 hour flight!

We landed in Dubai not exactly fresh but feeling pretty good considering how long we’d been in these clothes 😄

We made it to our hotel, Hilton Doubletree Business Bay. They checked us in at 9:30am and upgraded us to a corner suite! All because Ty got us platinum status with his credit cards. (Crazy!) Times like that make me so thankful my husbands hobby is travel and points. This hotel room was crazy big, of course when we don’t have kids with us.

View of the Burj Khalifa tower from our room

We sucked up the jet lag and headed to the Burj Khalifa Tower. We had reservations to go up it that morning. It’s the tallest building in the world currently at 160 floors. The word is you’re supposed to be able to see the curvature of the earth from the viewing deck. But dang it was too hazy to see that far. But the view sure was impressive.

124 floors up

The tower tickets included the indoor aquarium at the mall. So that’s where we headed next.

We also saw what Chili’s restaurant is in Arabic.

American Paddle Fish – weirdest fish ever!

We walked a bit outside, saw a water fountain show, and then took a cab to the old town market area to shop.

The odd thing was all the shops sold the exact same tourist crud. Scarves, spices, knockoff bags and watches. Every shop was exactly the same and everyone will, ‘make you a good deal’. We went through one whole side of the market before taking a boat across the river to shop the other side.