Saudi Diaries — Part 11: The Longest Drive — From AlUla to Riyadh

The sun was already up when we loaded the car, but the air still had that fragile morning coolness that AlUla wears like a secret before the heat comes to claim the day. I took one last look at the rocks — those impossible, wind-carved giants that had watched over us for days — and said a silent ma’a salama. Then we pointed the car east, toward Riyadh.
“How far is it?” I asked, already knowing the answer would humble me.
“About twelve hours,” Abdulaziz said, like it was nothing. “Maybe a little more.”
​Twelve hours. Over a thousand kilometers. The longest single stretch of the entire trip, and we hadn’t even left the parking lot.

Al-Serah Laban - Saudi breakfast for road champions :-)

The Gas Station Breakfast
We needed fuel before anything else — the car’s and ours. The gas station was exactly what you’d expect and nothing like what I’d imagined: the sharp bite of petrol in the air, shelves stacked with chips, chocolates, dates, and drinks in a dozen unfamiliar brands. And there, tucked into a cooler between the soda and the juice boxes, I found something that stopped me: Leban.

This one was Al-Searah Leban, from Tabuk, up in the north. And even Abdulaziz got excited. This brand is not available in the south of the country where he is from. The leban was thick enough to coat the inside of the cup. Tangy in a way that woke up every corner of my mouth. Slightly salty, in that way that makes you crave the next sip before you’ve finished the first. It tasted good. Like a product of a country that has been perfecting dairy since long before anyone thought to put it in a bottle with a label.

I made a sound somewhere between delight and disbelief. Abdulaziz looked at me, amused. “You are this happy about gas station yogurt?”

I was. Genuinely. This wasn’t a dish plated for tourists — this was just what people drink on an early morning or after a heavy lunch over here. And that, to me, was the real Saudi Arabia. Not the polished version. The lived-in one.

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The Phone Call That Changed The Plan
Back on the road, the landscape began to soften. AlUla’s dramatic sandstone formations gave way to flatter, wider terrain — desert in every direction, patient and unhurried.
We started talking logistics. After arriving in AlUla with no real plan the first time, we were determined to be responsible now. 

A few days in Riyadh, Abdulaziz suggested, while I was scrolling through Google Maps. Followed by Abha — Abdulaziz’s hometown, which he’d been promising to show me since the day we met.
It lasted about ten minutes.
Then his phone rang. I couldn’t understand the words, but I could read his face — the shift from relaxed to focused, the short replies, the sigh as he hung up.
“I need to be in Dammam,” he said. “In two days.”
Dammam. Over 1,500 kilometers away, on the eastern coast, in the exact opposite direction from everything we’d just planned

Let’s Wing It
Just like that, the itinerary dissolved. Abha was out. The plan — the real plan, the one Abdulaziz had been looking forward to — was gone. All we had left was a deadline and an open road.
I felt something close to excitement. This was travel doing what travel does best: refusing to be predictable.
Abdulaziz felt the opposite. He looked genuinely apologetic, almost embarrassed, like he’d broken a promise. He wanted to give me his hometown, his people, his streets — and now he couldn’t.
I told him not to worry. I meant it. Because in that moment of his disappointment, I saw something more valuable than any itinerary: he wasn’t thinking about the inconvenience to himself. He was thinking about what he promised me. That’s what stuck with me the most — not the missed detour, but the depth of care behind it.
“This is the trip,” I told him. “Not the plan. This, right here.”
The Uneventful, Beautiful Middle

So we drove. For hours.
Small villages rose out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast — a cluster of low buildings, a mosque with its minaret catching the light, then desert again. Heat shimmered on the horizon in long, wavering sheets. Once, a small herd of camels ambled across the asphalt ahead of us, entirely unbothered by our existence, and we slowed to let them pass like royalty.

Nothing happened, in the best possible way. There’s a rhythm to a long desert drive — the hum of the engine, the road stretching flat and endless, the towns appearing like islands in a sea of sand. I found myself wondering about the people in those towns. What it means to know every face for miles. To measure time by the sun instead of a calendar. To live at the edge of so much emptiness and still feel entirely at home.

The McArabia in Hail
By early afternoon, we reached Hail, a proper city rising out of the flatness like a mirage that turned out to be real. And after hundreds of kilometers of desert, we pulled up to — of all places — a McDonald’s (because I suggested so).
There was something almost funny about it. We’d crossed the ancient heart of Arabia to eat at an American drive-thru. Then I saw it on the menu: the McArabia — grilled chicken, lettuce, tomato, and garlic sauce, wrapped in soft Arabic flatbread instead of a bun.
It was familiar and foreign at once. The chicken tasted like chicken anywhere. But the bread and that garlic sauce gave it a distinctly local accent — a global chain speaking with a Saudi voice.
“You traveled all the way to Saudi Arabia to eat McDonald’s?” Abdulaziz asked, shaking his head, laughing.
Maybe. But even in the most globalized corners of the world, there’s room for a local stamp. Every place bends the things it borrows into something of its own. That felt worth celebrating, garlic sauce and all.

Into Riyadh, After Dark
The final stretch blurred together — the sun sinking lower, shadows stretching long across the road, conversation drifting between comfortable silence and talk of Dammam, of what came next, of how little this trip resembled what either of us had planned.
By the time the lights of Riyadh appeared on the horizon, we’d been driving for over twelve hours. My body was tired in that deep, satisfying way. The city rose out of the dark ahead of us, sleek and glowing, and it felt different from the Riyadh I’d imagined before the trip — because this one, I’d earned.
Only then did we realize, in all the chaos of replanning, that neither of us had booked a hotel. We pulled into a gas station on the edge of the city, phones out, laughing at our own disorganization, and found a room in minutes. We checked in exhausted, barely functional. Tired but happy. And ready to collapse into our beds.
Or so I thought. Because right as I was mentally horizontal, Abdulaziz had another one of his ideas — the kind I'd learned, by now, never to argue with.

​"We need real food," he said. "Not McDonald's."
Fair. If lunch had been a joke we were both in on, dinner was going to be the correction — something to balance the scales after a McArabia in Hail. He ordered in what felt like thirty seconds flat, and not long after, dinner arrived at the door: Kabsa Hashi.

I'd had kabsa before, in Jeddah, but this was different — kabsa made with hashi, tender camel meat, slow-cooked until it practically surrendered at the touch of a finger. The rice underneath was fragrant with cardamom, cinnamon, and something smoky I couldn't quite name, each grain separate but soaked through with flavor.
​On the side sat a simple fresh salad — cucumber, tomato, onion, sharp with lemon — and a few lemon wedges to squeeze over the meat itself.  ​

A cold can of soda sat next to it all, condensation running down the side, somehow the perfect ending to a day that had run entirely on gas station snacks and fast food.
I took the first bite of camel meat carefully, half-expecting something gamey or tough. It was neither. It was soft, rich, almost buttery, falling apart the way meat only does when someone has had the patience to cook it low and slow for hours. It was, without question, the best thing I had eaten all day — maybe all trip. And it was something I knew, with total certainty, I would not be able to recreate at home. Not the meat, not the rice, not this exact, specific tiredness that made every bite taste like a small victory.
We ate mostly in silence, too worn out for much conversation, trading the occasional look that said everything the day had been — the Leban, the phone call, the McArabia, the endless road — without either of us needing to say it out loud.

We drove across the Kingdom in a single day. We changed our plans in a single phone call. We ate gas station yogurt and McDonald’s sandwiches. And I would not trade a single moment of it. This is what travel is supposed to be. Not a checklist. A story.
We crashed to sleep that night, too tired to even unpack. But as I closed my eyes, I smiled. Tomorrow was a new day. And in Saudi Arabia, tomorrow always brought something unexpected.