Tanned, Rested, and Ready for Retirement
We've just spent four days at Kim's Beach Hideaway, at Toowoon Bay, up the Central Coast. My God, this has been the best vacation I've ever had. Even though we took the least expensive option available - midweek, off-the-beach instead of beachfront semi-attached bungalow - I have trouble only in failing to imagine going back again and for longer. Three buffet meals a day, and a bell rung at the dining hour, with cocktails at seven, hundred-year-old Norfolk pines lining the central walkway, bamboo and Balinese gardens, and the beach just an arm's length (or short walk, anyway) away, I could picture myself a new Ernest Hemingway (if only it was as cheap as Cuba back then). The food was never short of wonderful and plentiful. The beach stretched for miles. And if we were slightly plagued by a surfiet of seaweed, and if the water was perhaps cooler than average this past week, it didn't matter. Father-in-law Russell and cousin-in-law Don separately threw money at us for Christmas to pay for exactly this, after all our medical travails in 2006, and for four days, we recouped every agony. Well, sort of, at least as far as it's possible to do so. I'll be saving money this year to go again as soon as possible. What I think I'd really like is to spend a week in winter and really settle into a little writerly fantasy. I'll remember to bring my own cocktails, though, seeing as how the booze is more than a little pricey. Worth every damn penny, just the same.