Day 264: Resort’ing Very Hard at the Alila Manggis
We are loving Alila Manggis. Excellent service that isn’t in your face, immaculately maintained, really good food, perfect weather and the constant rhythm of waves crashing nearby.
The early arrival on check-in day allowed us to get fully settled and comfortable on Day 1.
And we woke up on Day 2 staring down a completely free day. Nothing scheduled, no decisions, zero stress.
I swam laps around 7 and then we all went to breakfast around 8.
(Despite the immaculate property, the pool water is strangely cloudy and greenish. I got an automated email around midday from the Alila asking if we had feedback. I wrote that everything was amazing except the pool water seems dirty. They came and found us at the pool a couple hours later, profusely apologized, explained that there had been a broken filter pipe and they were treating the water overnight.)
We’ve seen just about every style of breakfast this year but we had a first for juice selection: a server comes around at the beginning of the meal with a gorgeous tray filled with various selections of juice, each flavor in their own style of glass. Today the choices were honey-dew melon juice, orange-ginger juice or a mango smoothie. Of all the things we’ll miss when this year is over, the seemingly unlimited supply of tropical fruit will be near the top.
Yesterday I noticed a woman at the pool who looked just like Rachel Hunter. We saw the same woman again this morning having breakfast with a large group of about 15 women. Back at the room I googled Rachel Hunter to get a recent pic. It’s her! Her website said she’s leading a yoga retreat in East Bali right now!
The first time I saw Rachel Hunter, I was around 10 years old and she was on a poster taped to the walls of Tiger Craft’s bedroom. His grandmother was Eileen Ford (of Ford Models) so he had autographed posters of all the SI Swimsuit legends. Hunter is a Kiwi, as are most of the women in her group.
We did school after breakfast. Our room has a big balcony with ocean and pool views — it might be my favorite “classroom” location of the year. The breeze off the water is warm but not sticky. And the kids are really engaged in their work right now which makes everything better.
I’ve been carrying around a big stack of homemade sight word flashcards in James’s school stuff. He knows most of the words now so we reviewed them all, getting rid of all but the few he still needs to practice.
I remember starting the stack in Santiago in January. Often we would use hotel notepads for the cards. It fun to go through them all — the Miramar in Rio, the Chateau St. Martin in the Cote D’Azur (sigh), the Intercontinental in Hong Kong. Sometimes I need a reminder like this to help me comprehend all of the places we’ve been this year.
We read that the Blue School kids are doing self-portraits so we set Willa up in front of a mirror to do the same.
We had lunch at the pool and spent the afternoon swimming, reading and playing soccer.
The pool is absolutely perfect for our kids. It’s huge, warm and super shallow around the edges. Willa must have spent 3 hours in the pool. Cloudy water didn’t bother her a bit.
At 3pm the resort rolls a tea and sweets cart out to the grass near the pool. The guests all make their way over and pickup some iced tea and a couple mini desserts. It’s a nice afternoon touch.
We encouraged our little sweet tooths (sweet teeth?) to bring a towel over near the cart and set up a “picnic.” They buddied up with the woman running the cart and had a blast.
After baths and a shower we headed to the beach bar again for dinner, happily accepting a limited menu in exchange for the casual vibe, the waves and the breeze. The kids had been asking about sitting at the bar so we encouraged them to do so on their own. We ordered them a “Red Senzation” split into two small glasses. It’s their idea of beverage perfection: “Kintamani’s strawberry, lime wedges, white sugar, lime leaf, mint leaf, soda water.”
The kids had penne with tomato sauce and played Rat-a-Tat Cat (which has made a comeback). I had a tasty pasta with shrimp, red peppers and zucchini. Other than weakly poured G&Ts it was pretty much perfect.
After the kids went to bed I had two phone calls: my brother at 9pm, and then Margaret joined me for a chat with Jeff Riddle at 10pm. Jeff is my former exec coach / Yoda / friend. We got some advice from him about how to think about re-entry, figuring out the next chapters of our careers, etc. Lots to think about!
