Pretty nice for a tent huh?
I need to get me one of these.
When we awoke on Thanksgiving morning we had a quick breakfast and headed back to Mada'in Salih to see some of the tombs we missed the day before.
This one was filled with a lot of sand. 
We were checking out one of the tombs when suddenly a group of young Saudi men drove up. They saw us and instantly walked up to us, shook our hands, and had us take a picture with them. They seemed very excited to see us. As they were leaving they told us that one of the guys was a farmer and grew oranges. 
So he got into his vehicle and started giving everyone oranges. It was pretty funny and we all thought it was very nice. He originally just gave us one each, but then just gave us an entire box. 
We drove to the next group of tombs and then a completely different group of people drove up, instantly walked up to us with a bunch of smiles on their faces, shook our hands, and then had us take yet another group picture! This time there was no oranges, but again, it was really funny. I guess it is stadard procedure to take pictures with Americans at Mada'in Salih.
One of the best parts of being at Mada'in Salih was there was only a handful of people there the entire time. We practically had the whole place to ourselves. Mostly because many Saudis won't go there and its such a difficult place to make arrangements to get to. It will probably be the only time I go to such a significant world site with only a few people there. 
Here we are again at one of the Nabatean holy places. We're just messing around.
While visiting one of the tombs our guide found an ancient coin, probably Nabatean or Roman. He won't be able to tell until he takes it back to be examined. Had I known ancient coins were that easy to find I would have been looking more carefully.
The whole trip was definitely the experience of a lifetime. 
We left Mada'in Salih and headed back to Al Ula. There was a mountain there with an old temple place on top. We weren't able to get there because to do so, you had to climb some ropes up the cliff to reach it, and also we were on limited time. Here we are climbing the stairway up the mountain. Though we didn't make it to the temple area, we did get to a place with a ton of very old petroglyphs.
This is so much like Utah it is unbelievable. It was just like looking at a panel of petroglyphs back home.
Except instead of seeing big horn sheep, you see tons of pictures of camels. 
Here is a guy riding a camel.
This one actually did surprise me because these look very close to the big horn sheep that we have back home. I asked the guide what these were and he said they might be some kind of sheep with horns, but these animals don't live in the area as far as I know. We also saw petroglyphs of lions and baboons as well.
There was also a ton of grafiti on this panel of petroglyphs, which is very annoying.
Here is the view from the canyon near the temple and petroglyphs.
We headed back to the hotel and packed our bags. We then began our drive back to Medina to catch a flight. I thought we were going to die. Our driver was probably going 100mph trying to get us to an ancient Jewish town here in Saudi. He wanted us to get there before sunset. It gets dark at 5:00 now. The dam below is the site of the ancient Jewish town. Its all we got to see of the site. Apparently people here don't like others to see it and just pretent like it never existed.
Both our driver and our police escort were driving like crazy. Our escort had his lights going the entire ride. We were swerving in and out through cars, slamming on breaks constantly. Incidentally, Saudi Arabia has one of the highest numbers of car wrecks in the world. I've witnessed more than a few since I've been here. One of the guys in our group asked our guide "what happens if you hit a camel?" I thought to myself that it was a silly question. We'd be dead at the speed we were going. If we were survived the van would likely be beyond repair. Our guide told us that if you hit a camel during the day, you have to pay the owner the price of the camel. If you hit a camel at night the owner of the camel has to pay your car damages. We actually stopped for a moment while we were switching escorts and the policeman had to turn on his sirens and herd a bunch of camels into the desert with his car so nobody hit them. He actually drove them pretty far into the desert too.
We arrived at the Medina airport. It was packed. We supposed it was due to all the pilgrims leaving Medina after the Hajj. We finally found the place we were to be at and had ourselves a nice "Thanksgiving dinner". Mine consisted of pizza, pepsi, and a slice of dry chocolate cake. 
While we were eating, a security guard came up and told us that some official looking guy in an office wanted to talk to us. We weren't sure what to make of that. We sent Sam to go talk to him. The man told Sam that one of the princes of Saudi Arabia saw us walking around the airport and he wanted to know what we were doing there. Sam told the guy we were just coming back from Mada'in Salih and we were flying back to Riyadh. We were relieved. We thought maybe we were in trouble or something.
We got on the plane for a short trip back to Riyadh. Here is a view of Riyadh from our plane. It was nice to be back. It was a little less nice that we only had one day left of our vacation. But I was grateful we were able to travel as much as we were. And now it will be a lot simpler to write blog posts because I probably won't have nearly as many pics to put up!
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