I am a type of person that likes planning things and of course when the plans work out. But travelling with kids may never follow a strict plan. So over time I learned, no, not to live without a plan, but at least to plan the ‘unplanned’. My ability to accommodate plan failure was recently tested during our trip to UAE.
At a first glance two weeks in Dubai seemed as too long to fill the days but only until I started looking at what can be done there with kids. It appeared that there are more activities than the days we have, moreover that we also wanted to visit other cities. So we had to do some filtering and finally we came up with one attraction /activity /visit a day, sometimes taking up the whole day, sometimes just few hours (the rest being the planned ‘unplanned’ time). The guides and internet were telling that April is a good month for visiting Emirates as it is not yet too hot so quite some activities involved outdoors exploration (and we never considered Dubai as beach destination).
However the first day we left the hotel to explore heritage area of Dubai we realised that the weather forecast apps were not lying and that 38 degrees are indeed hot. As the heat is dry and seemed manageable in the shadow, we still made it to Dubai museum on foot (some 1,5 km) but looking at the faces of my kids I realised that any further stay outside during lunch hours would make us slowly roasted tourists in own juices. So there and then I had to admit that our exploration holidays have to be transformed into beach/pool holidays with occasional evening sightseeing. Luckily parts of the initial plan could be saved by the fact that in the afternoons, around 5pm, the temperatures become acceptably warm but any sightseeing had to be squeezed in two hours as by 7pm the sun was definitely down. It was also interesting to see how the place is adapted to the heat – the bus stops have air conditioned cubicles, quite some of the attractions are located inside mega shopping malls, even the zoo in Sharjah is set the way that the visitors watch the animals from air conditioned premises. On the other hand we learned that Emirates have great beaches too (like Mamzar beach park in the photo), something we probably would have missed under the original plan!