L. Miller Minutes

We made a quick trip up to Thuwal on Cinco de Mayo to catch the sunset from the beach. Thuwal is a coastal town approximately an hour north of Jeddah situated on the Red Sea.

_{Our route from Makkah to Thuwal on Highway 15.}

The route from Makkah to Thuwal is primarily north on Highway 15, which is the main highway from Medina to Makkah. The drive is easy – not too busy, the highway is wide, speed cameras make sure no one is going too fast, and the other traffic is primarily semi-trucks and large buses carrying Umrah folk between Makkah and Medina. A fact I hadn’t realized until writing this is that Highway 15 runs the length of Saudi Arabia, from the Jordanian border in the North to the Yemeni border in the South – a distance by car of 1533 miles (approx. 28 hours) which is a little shorter than the distance from Columbus, Ohio to Las Vegas.

The beach at Thuwal, at least on a Sunday evening, is calm and low-key. Families relax, kids take a dip in the water, and everyone participates in the ubiquitous and universal watching of the sun set. Life guards were on duty, and the beach is fairly clean. An aside: bathrooms leave much to be desired, and despite having cool architecture, it’s best to go ahead of time, or hold out for a masjid bathroom or a fast-food joint’s bathroom.

Unless otherwise noted, these photos were taken with my Olympus OMD EM10 with a Sigma 19mm (38mm eq.) f2.8 lens.

Cheers.