Isla de Encanta - Day Eight, Apparently. Momma, I'm coming home.

I was not ready to fly home Thursday.  I missed the girls, and I missed my guitar and beyond that.. well, I would have made do.  I would have forged the girls some passports, and had them and the axe shipped to me if it meant I could stay on the beach for just a little while longer.

Nonetheless, I got up early, packed up all my shit and headed down to breakfast.  You know how you can never seem to pack everything up the same way you did when you arrived somewhere?  Yeah, I'm really glad I'm not big on buying souvenirs for people.  I had a drum, a chess set, and a flute and a plinky-plunky weird instrument to bring home.. somehow, someway, I got it all into my suitcase, oddly enough, and ended up with LESS in my carry-on bag even.  The plan was to check out and then take all my stuff to Kaylee and Mindy's room since check out time was 1pm, but my bus for the airport didn't leave until 8pm.  This would save me either paying for late-checkout, or storing or lugging my shit around for the rest of the day.

A few times I was close to tears, I did NOT WANT TO LEAVE.  All I could think of was having to go right back to work on Monday, and snow.  Holy crap, I did NOT want to see snow.  Especially knowing that we were supposedly supposed to get a giant mother of all snow-storms here, and knowing that my car would be sitting at the Park N Fly for a week in all that B.S.

Really, would you want to leave this...

...for this?  Photo Credit

So I spent the morning on the beach, guerilla-tanning because to my naked eye, I still looked Irish as all hell.  Go SPF 30.  I set my phone alarm so I would know when it was time to go check out.  When I went to the check out desk, I ran into Alain the Quebecois taxguy and his friend at the front desk heading out for an excursion.  In the name of keeping what happens in the tropics, in the tropics, I chit chatted, told them I was checking out and wished him a pleasant remainder of his holiday but did not ask for contact info.  He kissed me good bye and wished me well and that was that.

I just shared a rather awkward lunch with an elderly German by the name of Fritz who spoke not a work of English.  After a stilted introduction, we chewed in silence for a good ten minutes.  Upon finishing, I didn't want to just walk away so I said a quick "Guten Tag, Fritz," as it's the only German I know.  "Ah, Danke Shen (sp?)" he replied.
I think I've hit my weirdness threshold for this trip.  - Vacation Journal, 02/04/2011

Yup, the lunch with the elderly German man was an interesting point to the trip.  For the remainder of the day we kind of took it easy, sat on the beach some more, then went back to the plaza for a while as we still had not completed our souvenir shopping.  We spent a good amount of time in one store that was being run by two friendly local girls, one of whom was fascinated with both mine and Kaylee's facial piercings and expressed a wish to get something of her own done.  The music they were playing was killing me, in a good way.. they were playing bossa nova type covers of Guns 'N' Roses songs by an unknown (to me) female singer.  Most other GNR fans might kill me for this, but man, they were AWESOME and I wanted to find out where I could get the CD, because I would have played the hell out of that at home.

I made a mistake in my last post and it was actually the last night while we were waiting for the buffet to open up that we ran into our family from Listowel and had our pictures taken.

About five minutes before the bus for the airport showed up, I realized I didn't have my travel documents in my purse and I pretty much lost my shit.  After rifling through my bags near tears and muttering 'ohshitohshitohshitohshit' I ran like the devil back to the girls' suite and lo and behold there they were, on the kitchen table, so I grabbed them and ran like the devil back to the lobby.

Getting on the bus I struck up conversation with my seatmate, whose name escapes me now, and it struck me how comfortable I got over the week with just talking to strangers.  A week previously I had sat silent and awkward and not talking or making eye contact.  One week later I was telling this guy from Newmarket my life story.

Vacations make you friendly.

I narrowly escaped an awkward three and a half hour plane ride when I misread my boarding pass and sat myself down in row 11, seat H only to discover 10 minutes later that J, one of the young hamilton boys who had been systematically avoiding and/or being vaguely awkward with me since things had gotten a bit hot'n'heavy at the beginning of the trip came and sat down in seat J.  Hoo boy, yes that would only happen to me.  Weird.  However, one of the other guys came up and made the discovery that I was in HIS seat, to which I had to ask "Well, where the hell am I sitting?" to which I replied to myself "Oh, you're sitting another ten rows back, you jackass."

So I suffered 5 or so minutes of awkwardness of looking creepy in exchange for 3 hours of awkwardness sitting one seat away from my holiday booty call.  I'll take looking like an idiot who can't read a boarding pass, thanks.

However, these guys were not to get rid of me so easily, because after the flight, and customs and such I got my stuff and got on the shuttle bus to the Park N Fly, and all bloody twelve of them were on the bus.. and as it turns out, were parked about six spaces away from me.  Oh, and the good news is that my car had maybe 2 cups of snow on it, so there was no digging to be done, which is good because I had a 3 hour drive to Mildmay to embark on so that I could attend the wedding of one of my best friends that day.

That's right, I de-planed, drove out to farm country in the middle of the night and went to a wedding the next day, because I am hard-core like that.  It was a beautiful wedding too, small but very elegant, and pulled together in a very short period of time.  Krys and her new hubby Dean seemed ridiculously happy, and I am happy for them.  Warms this cynical jaded heart of mine.

The restaurant where they had the reception was attached by a small corridor to a sports lounge so after all the family went home, we went to the lounge and in all our wedding finery had some beers and did some karaoke.  I ran into the ex-girlfriend of one of my online friends who lives in the area.  After I introduced myself she rang him up to let him know I was in the area.  Unfortunately our ride ended up leaving before he got there so we were thwarted on meeting in person once again.  Such is life.

Sunday we all went out for breakfast in Walkerton before I headed out to see my Grandma Ruth.  We had a nice visit, then I headed home as I was having dinner at my other friend Tessa's place that night, which was a good time, I met a friend of hers and we've been chatting since.  Tess also packed me leftovers for lunch the next day and it was kick ass.  So all told, I didn't get home until 8:30 sunday night, just in time to have to work Monday.

Okay, phew.  Done.  On to other topics now....