For our last days in Saudi Arabia, we were provided with a car and driver by Tim’s US-Saudi organization to go wherever we wanted whenever we wanted. We took most advantage of it on the Saturday before flying out on Sunday, and one of the places we went was to was a Riyadh neighborhood that we had seen from a distance but never visited. It seemed appropriate to cruise yet one final residential area considering how much time we had spent doing that during our three years there, photographing both the houses and gates that I was so taken with.

The driver had never had a request to do something like that and was a bit mystified at first but took us to the neighborhood and started driving around. After hearing things like “Stop! Back up! Move forward! Go around the block again!” he got the idea and really got into it, saying, “How about this one? You can’t miss that gate! Let’s photograph this one!” and such. All in all we had a fun time, and indeed it was one of the nicest neighborhoods we had visited.

We had seen this enormous house from a distance (next picture), and I just had to try to photograph the gate close up. When we got there, the gate was open, and I was a bit hesitant to lean out and take the picture with that man standing right there. Our driver said not to worry, he’d talk to the man if he objected, so I did, and he didn’t.

Fall has arrived! posted earlier: