4:00 AM: The alarm goes off, and the team starts to groggily wake up. People rush for their last chance at a hot water shower.
4:30 AM: Everyone walks to breakfast, gazing at the Dakhla night sky, admiring thousands of stars and the Milky Way.
4:35 AM: Everyone is scrambling to get pancakes and crepes. Dakhla Attitude put out an early breakfast for the team, but I think they underestimated how much a kiteboarding team of 24 can eat for breakfast.
5:00 AM: Two busses show up to the restaurant, the team piles into them, and everyone falls asleep as soon as we start moving.
6:00 AM: We arrive at the airport. The team finds a dump truck filled to the top with board bags and suitcases. Everyone waits to grab their luggage.
7:00 AM: By now the team has all of the gear, and we begin to check in for our flight. The process was easy. Only one person got the wrong ticket. This is a pretty good success rate for a group of 24 travelers.
8:00 AM: We make the walk out to the plane, shooting our last images of the Western Sahara.
10:30 AM: We arrive in Casablanca.
10:50 AM: As the team goes through customs, we pleasantly find out that about half the team’s passports got stamped in Dakhla and the other half had no stamp. This sent many people on a chase around the airport to find this stamp.
11:30 AM: Everyone is through customs. We break off into groups to explore the Casablanca airport looking for some good food.
12:30 PM: Everyone boards the flight, and we take off to Rome.
4:00 PM: We touch down in Rome. Everyone’s are were pressed against the windows, taking in the breathtaking Italian landscape.
4:30 PM: We have a short connection so the team rushes through the airport. There was a little confusion about the local time, and some people went to find food thinking they had more time. Many WhatsApp messages were sent as warnings to those people to hurry up. The rest of the team was sitting on the plane waiting to leave.
5:00 PM: The whole team amazingly makes it on the flight and we take off on our last flight of the day.
6:00 PM: We arrive in Sicily right as the sun is setting behind the beautiful Sicilian mountains.
6:45 PM: We wait for the 50+ bags to show up. There are questions about whether all the bags will show up.
7:00 PM: Everyone finds their bags, to much surprise, and we start our adventure toward customs. When the agents working the checkpoint saw a queue of 24 kiteboarders, each equipped with one or two full gear bags, they just waved us through not checking anyone’s bags.
7:30 PM: We find a massive 50-person bus waiting outside the airport. I think more people were stoked on the fresh Italian pizza waiting inside the bus than on the bus itself. As the team demolishes these pizzas, we begin our journey to ProKite Alby Rondina.
10:00 PM: We finally arrive to find three elegant villas. As the team tiredly pulls their gear into to the houses, we are all happy to be in Sicily and frothing to ride the butter flat water.
Story and photos by Noah Shapiro and Kimo Mahmoud