Beach bums

The first few days we weren't in any rush. The hotel had it's own stretch of beach for guests only and it was nice. There are plenty of "have to see" beaches, but those are also the most crowded ones and the ones booming with discotech music all day & night. Not my kind of beach. The Capri Beach Club, as it was called, had beach chairs & loungers, shade, beach, grassy area and a cafe where you could order meals & snack AND charge it to your room. That meant not having to bring our wallet to the beach. BIG BONUS!

Where the waves break, the sand is literally chock full of every kind of shell you could want to find! And that spells heaven for my little hunters & collectors; mainly Grant & Mairyn. The beach was lined with coconut trees and all of them had coconuts at some stage of development. The club said they monitored the trees on our beach so that there weren't any in imminent danger of falling to the ground. Grant found a coconut further down the beach, just laying in the sand. He hauled it back to me and wanted to shuck it. Aw shucks, Grant, why don't you ask me to do something hard? Fortunately, it was a bit waterlogged and part of the husk was pulled back. So we husked a coconut right there on the beach. We got our own brown, fuzzy coconut! The part where the husk was pulled back, there was a crack in the shell, so we pulled that part off and got to peer into a newly opened coconut, all white and fragrant inside.

The Journey begins

So, we went to Thailand for Christmas. It was about the furthest I was willing to go; just 4 hours ahead of us. I did not want to deal with serious jet lag. The flight was, um, longer than expected. The itinerary we'd been given said we would fly Bahrain to Doha, change planes there, Doha to KUALA LAMPUR (oh yes, i'm serious) stay on the plane in Malaysia for an hour and a half, then *finally* land in Phuket. Blerg.

The kids were excited to finally be leaving for Thailand. We couldn't decide whether to surprise them the day before or include them in the plans. We chose the former. The flight left at 11pm. Huge, huge thing to remember --> don't *ever* do a transfer in Doha. The bus from the plane dropped us off at the mail terminal and left us in the exhaust. Going through the sliding doors, it was mass chaos somewhat on par with the mobs in the Ataba souk in Cairo. No direction, just a huddled group of 4 random airline employees right before the cordoned security check area. Not that they were any help, they gestured to their right and left. Crap.

We elbowed our way to a place in the crowd to see where we needed to go. I'm not shocked at the chaos or the inability to form a line; I just wanted to get through it. Traveling with a group of people is, in some ways, a bit easier than on my own. I can be Mama Bear and part the seas, keeping my children close and cutting off the people who weren't taught manners in Kindergarten. With Spence as my wing man, we jockeyed our way through the snaking line and, after an hour and a half, finally made it through the joke called security. You know how long our layover was? One hour and 40 minutes. Racing through the airport, we hear, "Thees ees the final boarding call for flight XX!" That's us! They closed the plane door behind us. Whew!

Now we've got a 10 hour flight. Poo. I was beginning to rethink this brilliant idea. But Qatar airways rocks. They are superb. We finally made it into Phuket at 4pm local time. Only took us 13 hours. I think Grant and Jacqui illustrate how all of us felt.

I was so tired, I had to do a double take when I looked in the front seat.
Maybe I sound ignorant, but I didn't know they drove on the left hand
side of the road. Go figure. It was so disorienting, I had to find other ways to
distract myself while in the car. Especially when we made a turn across traffic.
It was all I could do to not scream, "STOP! You're turning the wrong way!"



But this balcony view was worth the journey.