Destination: the dunes. Our objective was to ride out, have the children play in the sand at the bottom of the dunes, climb a bit as the wee ones were inclined, then ride back home. We could seriously have accomplished this in 1/4 of the time by hopping in the van, but at the top of the list for every Gobi tourist is a camel ride.
From my conversations with other travelers, however, this is the sort of activity most people look forward to with high expectations, but end up listing fairly low down on the list as travel highlights. Camel riding tourist style is slow, an odd kind of motion that many people find less than comfortable and, did I mention, slow? The scenery does not change much, so if you're in it for the photo, it's really better to get on, get your photo and hop back in the van.
As someone who formerly rode horses every day of my life (and who still actually owns a horse back in the US), the idea of "riding" in Mongolia was quite appealing. For me. However, I was not going to sacrifice my entire family to Mongolian horses, known to be a bit hard headed and and who list as hobbies "foraging" and "dumping tourists on their bums." I was willing to risk them to camels. This may represent nothing more than poor quality research on my part, as I do understand that people can and do end up in trouble camel riding, but it seemed like the odds of getting a sloggy camel were far better than a sloggy Mongolian pony.
It seriously took a village, or at least this entire ger family to get us loaded up and on the road. I will say that the local people we met were always delighted to meet children. I don't know how many times Soko translated, "They say they've never seen western children before!" And our little red-hair child is off the scale for interesting looking in most Asian cultures, so I do think more care was taken than for the average tourist group.
But in due course, we were on our way. The ride was slow, and quiet and I loved it.It was a thrilling feeling to see the dunes from the back of a camel. The children were quite enjoying it, also, the camels were high up, Tom was riding by himself and Hope with me, so we were all within our comfort zone. It was a short ish kind of ride to the dunes, so we had a few obligatory photos taken and we all hopped off to play in the sand. 
Tom and Jeff took off for a hike up the dune. Jeff and I were scheduled for a hike up the dunes sans children later in the afternoon, so I took the opportunity to not use up precious sand navigation reserves and hung out with Hope, playing in the sand. I'm the one in red, on the left.
The sand was all kinds of fabulous. It was silky soft from millennia of shift and blowing, warm to the touch on the surface and immediate quite cold once you dug down a few centimeters. Perfect for sand angels, practicing your handwriting in the sand and in general, just hanging out and enjoying the sun (if you happen to be a camel or a camel drover that is).
Then it was time to hop back on our trusty steeds for the ride back to the ger. This was where things got a bit boring for the non-horse crowd. Our drover, probably in an effort to give us our money's worth (by the way, everything was included in our tour, so other than on emergency supplies like additional TP some matches and a torch, we did not spend one thin tuppence the entire journey), he took "the long way." From where we were playing on the dune, we could see the ger, and it had taken us no more than 20 minutes to get to where we were (about a 20 minute walk, or a 4 minute van ride, I would say), so we figured it would be a quick ride back.
The rest of the crowd? Maybe a little less so.
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