We woke up full of energy and full of beans today. After days of travel, booze and excitement, it was a nominated rest day and a chance to take advantage of the five star resort.
After breakfast we had a lazy morning, slowly preparing for a day by the pool and made our way downstairs mid-morning. Never one to enjoy doing nothing, both myself and boy child had a game of Teqball. ‘What’s that?’ I hear you ask. It’s table tennis but with a football instead of a ping pong ball, played on a specially built sloping table. Fifteen minutes of playing that and the sweat was pouring off us both and the competition levels were getting serious…..so serious that we broke a plant pot and nearly fell through a hedge at one point. All of this, by the way, was just outside of the kids club building, so we decided to draw it to a close before we could pick a winner, probably best all round.
We moved down closer to the beach and just spent 20 minutes knocking a football 30 yards back and forth between us with bare feet with the sound of the ocean crashing in our ears from the Pacific just a few hundred meters away, magical father and son time.
With sweat dripping off us we made our way back up to daughter child who was happily lounging pool side. We showered away the salty efforts of the last hour and relaxed into the pool. Basketball nets had been fixed to the side of the pool and so we played pool basketball and made fun of each other.
Occasional interruptions to pick up drinks, cocktails or barbeque chicken fillets aside, we spent the day larking about and topping up tans. Daughter child got involved in a competitive game of holiday darts which, frankly, just annoyed me. These foreign types (save for the Dutch and Belgians) can’t seem to get their heads around a good old fashioned game of 501. They prefer playing with the wrong hand, spinning around before throwing and throwing all three darts at once. A total joke, it should never have been called darts.
That aside, it was a great way for me to chat with other parents in the crowd and I had a great chat with a family from Detroit. We shared stories and compared holidays and they seemed like great folks, not the usual loud and brash Americans you tend to find, and there were plenty of them around in this hotel, that’s for sure.
Mid-afternoon I checked out the gym and tried to run off some of the excesses of the previous days. I was sweating butter by this point, and then made a mockery of my good intentions. Dinner was 4 plates of competing meats and infinite carbs.
A new game had been invented that would be a lot of fun for everyone except me. I had bought some new sliders for the trip with a velcro front and so the game became ripping the velcro off whenever I wasn’t watching. I few times I heard the noise but didn’t realise what it was and walked off leaving my shoes behind.
My alcohol prevention jacket had well and truly worn off by this point and I was battered. The main damage was done by migalitos and the sick inducing ‘blow jobs’ but the fatal blow was dealt by the rainbow shots. This was the final stage of the night, 16 shots in a semi-circle around the table ranging from red, right around to violet, a rainbow of disaster. By this point, the kids were happy enough to stop drinking and so, to try and remain polite, I think I polished off around ten of the shots on my own.
There was almost an audible BANG as I ‘hit the wall’. Turns out, I found out the next day, that I was loudly laughing at the outfits of other guests around the bar and so that was seen as a good point for my friends and family to hasten me off to bed, for all our safety.
It is one of the very few times in my life that I didn’t brush my teeth before bed…but what a night!
Itchy Feet and Titchy Feet 