306 En route to Er Rachidia

6th September 2018  Miles Today 197 Total 1587 

We set off in light rain today and headed for some of the film sets that are dotted around the town. They were in the desert just West of town but fortunately Wallace was equipped for off toad as so we turned off the main drag onto open desert and just followed some wheel tracks to the film sets. The overnight rain had not even registered to the desert. Despite the fact that it was still raining, there was no sign of it in the desert, just on our visors. It was weird.

These are some of the shots we took.

Backdrop to some of the film sets.

The back of the film set.

A battering ram and an assault tower.

A trebuchet (Tree Bucket to you and I)

Looks just like a fort from a distance...

...and close up too.

 It had been raining on and off most of the night and when we finally left Tinseltown behind us and set off on our 300 km days ride the roads were wet and flooded in many places. Not a problem but unusual for our trip.

A real life oasis.

Most of the river beds were dry. This was an exception.

The kids were great. They were always waving and very happy. Needles to say, we reciprocated.

We saw a lot of this. Lots of "Nothing" according to Karen. Beautiful desert landscape for me.

Our second bum rest stop. A great little cafe. The guy insisted we took a sticker advertising his place with a camel on it. We did not disappoint him and it is now on one of the panniers. The bonus was that I didn't have to trade Karen in for the Camel.

We arrived at our destination Er Rachidia about 4pm and stopped at a cafe to find a hotel but for some reason we could not get their internet to work so I bit the bullet and bought a roaming internet package from EE mobile for £10. We fired up Karen's iPad and before we had even logged on to Booking.com the data had run out. I was seriously peed off. Our phones told us that the data had been available for a whole 3 minutes. Grrrr .....  Grumpy Raymond.

We gave up on the internet and rode back to a hotel that we had spotted on the way into town. The place was nice and the room was well presented and above all the internet worked. I was still seriously grumpy so I logged on to EE mobile and had an interesting on-line conversation with one of their reps and they eventually agreed to refund my £10. I was less grumpy after that. Little things please little minds.