Day 52: Last Full Day of “Vacation” Before Heading Back to “Reality”
The silly phrase “I need a vacation from my vacation” actually applies to our experience. These past few days have been a break from the trip. We intentionally planned a few of these, but didn’t actually think they’d be necessary. In fact they felt gratuitous. But now we know that the downtime and relaxation is welcome.
This morning we continued the theme of resort life and had a tennis lesson. At 9 am it was scorching out, so I did a steamy 45 minutes while James and Willa shared 15 min. Our super nice instructor Flavio spoke no English and looked like Bruno Mars.
We did beach, pool, lunch, more surfing… The resort days become less interesting to write about when it’s just more of the same.
One cool thing: Willa did a video chat with her first grade class back in New York! It was very exciting for her.
We enjoyed our last sunset caipirinha at the pool under the palm trees and showered up for dinner.
The quickest way from our room to the dinner hall is on a beach path that is pitch black at night (they don’t do lights near the beach to cut down on light pollution/avoid disturbing the wildlife) so we used our flashlight (thanks Beepaw Jim!) and headlamp (thanks Andy Eichler!) every night to get to and from dinner. Last night and tonight we spotted a fat toad the size of a kettlebell sitting on the grass. Eek.
We discussed highs and lows of the resort break at dinner. Among them:
Lows:
- Willa’s bad day of school earlier in the week, for both mommy and Willa
- The 15 minutes today when Teddy thought he’d lost his phone
- James said it was the day when mommy and daddy did emails on their computers for an hour and ignored him (lord)
Highs:
- Every day around sunset time
- Two particularly good seafood lunches
- Surfing and stand-up paddleboarding
- The breakfast buffet (James)
- Stargazing after dinner — our kids had never really seen stars before Peru so seeing a glittering sky night after night blows their minds.
We are ready to move on, but we very much enjoyed our funny, memorable time here at the Tivoli.
