Visit from the Punchers

We had some good family friends come by and visit us last week.  Graham and Charlie were so excited!  But first, we need to clean up a little!

By the way, on a side note, I had Graham vacuum out his school bag after a school trip to the beach. Yikes! What a mess when I opened up his bag!!!

Okay, I digress - back to the visit from the Punchers.  The boys jumped right into play time!

Eventually we will make one bracelet loom!

We weren't quite sure yet what we would do this weekend.  As I had missed the cut for the Fatima Bint Mubarak Ladies Open, we were free to do anything!  I decided to look into our HUGE coupon book and after just turning a couple of pages, I found a boat ride along the Corniche that seemed like fun.
A quick view from the Emirates Palace Marina. Who knew this place even existed!

Here's the crew! Charlie's Leo the Leopard had to come along of course:

And here's our Yellow Boat!

The adults have special life jackets that inflate automatically if and when we hit the water. Pretty neat! You'd think the kids would have the same ones too, but nope - just the traditional ones:

Somehow, Charlie does not seem very enthusiastic!

And gosh, our guide was going quite fast!  I think poor Charlie was pretending to be brave. But nonetheless, he hung on - literally as well!

We went by the fishing village - never really knew this place existed too! I know people come to the fish market by the port for good prices but I don't normally cook fish. Perhaps I am missing out!

A peek at the tallest flag pole in the UAE. It stands at 122 meters (just a little over 400ft) and was the tallest flag pole at one time in the world when it was completed in 2001.

It's too bad the UAE flag was not flying during our boat ride.  The water, however... was splashing about and poor Daddy on the back right of the boat got quite wet. Salty!!!

As you can see, the water is quite choppy out in the open.

Except for when we are more towards the inlet.  We found out that there is this stone wall that was built along part of the corniche to prevent flooding in Abu Dhabi!

As you can see, so much calmer here!  Almost the end of our tour.  Here's a view of the Emirates Palace and some sky scrapers in the backdrop - the 3 glass ones from the left (there's actually a group of 5) are the Jumeirah at Etihad Towers.  These towers were used during the 2015 movie filming of the Furious 7:

By the way, our guide loved taking these turns where the boat really leaned on my side!

Family photo op!

Hope the Punchers enjoyed it as much as we did!  And to top it off, some ice-cream at the revolving restaurant at the top of the tower by Marina Mall.

The boys really miss the Punchers.  Please come back and visit us again soon!