The next morning, we headed out of the Medina to meet our driver, Ali. I love following behind my gang…

Ali does an awesome job of getting us all packed up. He was ready for the Sahara too! I loved how he “dressed appropriately” for each day.

Ali is  a great guy and tolerates us getting in the car for 30 seconds before we all fall asleep!

I struggle with tolerating having a boy over 6 feet sitting beside me for hours…

We knew we had a long drive ahead to the desert.

We first hit up a small town, Ifrane, which looked like a little European city. It is a ski town, believe it or not. And the lion “rock” is an attraction:

We felt like this Charlie Brown tree should be an attraction too:)

We continued further and found the Barbary apes in a cedar forest in the Middle Atlas Mountains. We had a great time feeding them peanuts.

We continued to a few really nice lookouts to get some pictures – travelling through the Ziz valley.

Sam is truly a teen now. His enthusiasm was palpable for these jumping shots. In one shot, he didn’t even jump. I reminded him that we can actually SEE the results of the photo so he can’t just say “I jumped!” as if we wouldn’t notice (insert annoyed teen eyeroll here. But make sure it is followed by annoyed stepmom eyeroll too. Too bad I’m not one of those “kid pleaser” stepmoms desperate for my step kids to love me. Nope. I’m a “we will take this jumping picture 100 times if we have to” kind of stepmom, lol)) This was the best one:

Lunch was the worst one we had yet – a tourist trap for sure and we let Ali know we weren’t happy about it. (Funny story: because service was not good, we ended up going to the other side of the restaurant and bought our own drinks and bread etc. I happened to mention to Ali that the service was so poor, “we even went and bought our own bread”. Let me tell you, from that point on, we always had bread. And lots of it. Too much. Ali always made sure to tell all the restaurants “make sure they always have bread!” We were so breaded out!!)

It was a seriously long drive though, but the scenery was amazing (when we woke up! We joked that it was like we were all drugged in the car (we weren’t, don’t worry))

  

Sometimes there was just no where to stop to go to the bathroom so some had to improvise:

Ali waited patiently for us wherever we were:

Have I mentioned I love capturing this boy with his camera? I took a lot of these. I am very aware that the sand in the hourglass with this boy is slowly running out so I was taking a lot of pictures with my own camera, but mostly with my aching mama heart:

I guess even Zach wanted to capture all the time we spent in the car so snapped this one:

All was forgotten when we arrived Erg Chebbi – on the edge of the Sahara.

Ali got us all scarved up:

  

The camels were all waiting for us.

Josh took took the lead and quickly named is camel “Winston”. I was at the back.

  

Brace yourself for all the camel pics. I could not get enough:

And our shadow family that we decided to bring along:

Our guide took some great pics:

It was a super fun ride!

We got off mid way to watch the  beautiful sunset from the dunes (and our scarves came off at this point too)

We had to say good bye to our camels:

And headed over the dunes to our camp:

We had to stop first to watch the remainder of the sunset:

Our “Luxury safari camp” was pretty awesome. We had mint tea when we first arrived and sat around a fire.

Our accommodations included 3 big tents and they were equipped with a big bed, lots of blankets (although I was still cold – when the sun goes down it is freezing!) and a working bathroom!

We had dinner in the dinner tent…

and then went out again around the fire where there was singing and drums (which they made us do too!) and dancing (which they got everyone up and doing too!)

We headed back to the dunes to try to get some pictures of the amazing the stars. The moon was pretty bright, so hard to see the Milky Way. But Zach got a couple of great photos.

We got up again at 2:30am when the moon was lower to try for more photos but it really was no different so we quickly headed back to bed!

The desert is a thin place for sure.

(And if you are worried that you didn’t get to see enough camel photos, no worries, because we had another camel ride the next day:)