Long travel day today. We had another breakfast buffet at our airport Novotel. Good news: the tire didn’t deflate any more. We dropped off the car and gave them a heads up. We were pretty early, as always, and hung around the Muscat airport until our first flight. Millie couldn’t wait to have her Friday ice cream, so she got a 10AM cotton candy cone. Gross.

It was a short hop to Abu Dhabi. On the flight I started reading Braiding Sweetgrass, which is all about how people are connected to the land. As we flew over the sand and then got out of the plane into the modern, air conditioned airport, I realized why the UAE feels so disconcerting. How can anyone feel connected to nature here?

Because we booked our flights separately, we had to go through customs, all the way out, and then back through security again. Then we had 4 hours to wait. We got a late lunch, I tried getting more perfume samples from duty free, I bought some sunscreen, Millie played with Judy, and I tried salad chips (7/10).

We took off at 7 and landed in Tashkent at 10:30. Millie was fading fast and had a bit of a meltdown while going through passport control. We got cajoled into a taxi that we definitely overpaid for, but we were too drained to haggle. Our driver spoke good English and helped us find our Airbnb, which is in a complex of high rises. We followed him through alleys which felt slightly sketchy at midnight in a brand new country, but he was very kind.

We made it in and put Millie right to bed.