We've been waiting for this new wave pool to open in Al Ain for ages. Well it finally did and we headed out there last week to try out the waves on our SUPs! Surfing in the desert, pretty cool! You pay to get into the park and then you book a surf session with up to 6 other people. It's not really a wave pool, but a surf pool, even better! It took us a bit of time to get used the waves, but I am looking forward to next time and taking advantage of waves in the UAE hoping to help progress our surfing skills. There's also a whitewater park with 3 runs and we'll soon be headed down those on our SUPs too. This place is definitely an exciting addition to life in the UAE.

Just your typical drive home from Al Ain, look at how cute these baby camels are!

We've been trying to move for ages, over a year and half and all of this waiting has finally paid off. After looking for over a month for apartments and working out storage options for all of our SUPs we found a apartment Raha Beach. It's a new development with pools, gyms, storage, parking, grocery stores soon and we can't wait to get all settled in and start to enjoy. We've got the keys and can't wait to enjoy the beach, paddle whenever we want to, and entertain with sunset views!

We had a few pics in the SUP Calendar this year! 2 from Switzerland including this one we took of Neil heading down the Aare River in Thun and then one of the Dubai skyline at Sunrise.

We finally made it to the Mubadala Tennis Championship at the end of January to see some of the top tennis stars play in the annual event. We watched Djokovic and Tsonga play and not too bad for the cheap seats!

Nick's birthday was spent in the Desert quad biking: round No. 2

We had so much fun last year that looks like we're making Nick's birthday an annual quadbiking trip. We went out in the day time with a group of friends and enjoyed chasing each other up and over the san dunes.

Christmas Eve SUP through the mangroves! It was a beautiful morning and while I might miss the snow at Christmas time, being able to see the sun shine and get out and enjoy the water wand warm weather is pretty good too!

We're on to learning how to kitesurf now! Our friend Kareem is an instructor and we've been out twice, so looking forward to getting up on a board and actually seeing what this is all about! Obviously it looks fun, but it does takes a lot more time then just learning in a few hours...so we'll get there soon!

We joined other SUP'ers in Dubai to paddle around the world islands for Charity. It's 30km+ paddle and usually takes 4-6 hours, quite a paddle and something that we were thinking we should probably train a bit more then we had leading up to it. The morning of the paddle, security denied us access to paddle around the whole thing so we had to change course. While it was a bit shorter, we still did 25 km, had a great day out on the water and helped support Surf Aid International. The sunrise was amazing looking back to the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai skyline!

I am still busy playing hockey this season and we had our first game since Hong Kong! It was against the Dubai Mighty Camels, an expat female team that started a team this year. We won the game 5-4 and I took my first penalty shot and scored! We never really practice penalty shots, but thankfully I just thought back to Mighty Ducks and knew exactly what to do :)