The Perfect Imperfect Vacation

It was Asia night as the Patong Holiday Inn buffet which was clever marketing because considering the part of the world we were in they might as well have called it Thursday.  Elisa decided she wanted no part of Asia night and puked all over the table leaving Aidan, Lydia, and me to glance up, check our plates, and continue eating. Elisa had been pooping and puking her way past the past few days after all. Yang took Elisa back to the room and after quite some time returned with the both of them washed up. Aidan asked for the room key so he could go “poo-poo” himself and I gave it to him. A short time later Lydia asked to return to the room and I stayed behind a few minutes to keep Yang company and provide some kind of sympathetic presence. After 10 minutes or so I returned to the room since the kids are a bit too young to be left alone for very long. I knocked on the door. “Who is it?” called out Lydia and I replied before she let me in.

Inside I found a giddy Aidan and Lydia. Aidan had struggled to open the door earlier and ended up pooping his pants. Lydia arrived just in time to help with the clean up and according to Aidan,  Lydia knows “a bunch of tricks” about how to clean a pooped butt. This was empirically evident. Lydia hands held two kinds of hotel soap, the round face soap and rectangular body soap and she was going after it. There was a water spray use to wash the floor or sand off feet that she used to rinse. Aidan would periodically check his butt in the mirror for cleanliness. Sadly, I resisted taking pictures. They would have been great to show at Aidan’s wedding.

The entire four day vacation to Phuket was like that – the imperfect perfect vacation. There were enough things on this trip that didn’t quite go right that if I list them you might think it was an awful time, but it was a great time. Heck, I’ll list them anyway, must be something in the blood lines. First, the 2AM flight to Phuket and the 5AM return flight four days later. Elisa getting a stomach virus and having diarrhea that smelled some kind of dead and with perfect timing to land the diarrhea during two of our four dinners (another was the puke). The snorkeling tour that we took that consisted of two hours bus ride, five hours boat ride, and one hour snorkeling. That same tour not having gear that would fit Aidan or Lydia and no good way to complain about it. The same tour having a petty woman who stole our seats on the boat for a backpack and would not give them back. The fact that we could not find really good Thai food or even pure Thai restaurants within walking distance of our hotel – I swear Clement street has more. That our first Thai dinner was extremely slow (we could see the single chef cooking) and they messed up our order not once, but twice, and the second time we had to pay for it.

I could go on. Non of this mattered (whack, yang hits me as she was the one cleaning up after Elisa). We had a great time. Sure, the elephant ride was a only 15 minutes but when I asked Aidan if Elephants liked people he said “no, because we are on their backs.” At the snake show Elisa learned to make her now famous snake face and I learned I really do not like snakes.

We were thrilled to see Lydia want to take part in the monkey show and Aidan as well. I loved watching them at the kids pool, Lydia letting a smaller kid down the slide first and then going together down the slide with her brother. Aidan and Lydia writing there names on the beach.

The final night just before falling to sleep, I pulled Yang close and thanked her for more than I could ever imagine. Then the alarm woke us up at 2AM.