I woke up this morning to the alarm that I set for 8:30am. A few things to take care of today - mortgage clients bought a townhome that I have to do their mortgage today and Air Canada sent an email with a notification that Frankfurt may be seeing strike action later this week which may affect our flight home (as we have a connection) so if we want we can change our flights for no cost. Since Maria is the traveller extraordinaire I'll wait to chat with her about it at breakfast and see if I can do it on the app or have to do it on my computer or call in.
We meet them for breakfast, they've got a table for 4 outside. I got a lemonade jam today to have with my croissant and it's not my favourite..it has lemon zest in it and I think the little pieces of zest are what I dont love. It's still good though - my favourite is still the mixed berry, don't tell Jay.
Maria took a look at the email I got from AC and then looked up some flight options for us. The best option, I agree, is a return flight through Vienna which leaves Doha at 2:40am and has a 3h45m stopover in Vienna and gets us home at 1:30pm on Friday now (6 hours earlier which has Jay literally grinning because he can't wait to get home - you wouldn't think it but he's the homebody and misses the girls and the dogs and the house and his car and our friends and routine and always ALWAYS wants to go home early). So now we're leaving the resort at I don't know what time yet because we won't find out until tomorrow - then we leave Male to fly 5 hrs to Doha with a 3hr layover to Vienna with a 3.5hr layover and home. So I cancelled the airport hotel that we had booked in Doha because now we'll just be killing 3 hrs in the lounge in Doha and try to sleep on the first flight and then stay up the rest of the time because home is 11 hours behind us and it will be a pain to get back on 'time'.
I can't get it booked on the app, it keeps giving me an error message so I try on my computer and I get the same thing. I HATE that companies make it almost impossible to find a phone number to call and AC website has be turning around in circles before a Site Feedback tab pops up - I click it, its asking "Did you find what you were looking for today?" Fuck No. Would you like to elaborate in this blank space with room for 1000 characters - I sure would, thank you. I leave a polite but irritated message about how the "Contact Us" button should actually allow you to contact them and not give you the run around to anything but a phone number. I finally google "What is the phone number for Air Canada" and find it, I'm sure AC is working hard to purge that info from google, but whatever. I try it and it says it's the wrong number so I keep looking. Finally I google "how to make a 1-800 call out of Maldives". I have to dial 0-0-1-888-247-2262, the first 0-0 is to get out. I get through, I make it through all the prompts and it says there is a 20 min wait - that's not bad, I mean it is like 11:30pm Toronto time, it gives me the option to leave my phone number and have them call me back - amazing. Except apparently my calls are going straight to voicemail I have 4 bars here so I'm not sure why but they do. Maria has a magic concierge number she can call because of her status with AC so she's coming down to my room and I call in to AC again to see if the 20 min wait is really a 20 min wait or if it's longer or shorter. Someone picks up in probably about 12 minutes and within about 5 minutes he has my flights changed to the one I want and he has my seats selected and has emailed me a new itinerary - thank you very much!
Maria and I head to the adult pool, Jay goes to work out and Jim is hanging out in their room but will both meet us for lunch at the Thai restaurant a little later. We arrive at the pool and there isn't anyone there. I say "Shocking", someone comes down and brings us water with 2 glasses with ice, we didn't notice them but I saw them at our chair and transferred mine to my yeti cup.
Jay came, got in the water and we all . watched the fish and little reef sharks swimming under the pool within the breakwall. There were 2 little sharks maybe 18" long and then another that came by later that was maybe 2.5' long.
Jim met us for lunch, we went up the stairs to the Thai place and there weren't any tables for 4 so we sat in the same area but I sat with Jay and they had their own table. There was one other couple sitting at a table for 2 - the whole time we were there they didn't say a single word to one another, they were both on their phones as they ate sharing their meal. They were young, it could have been their honeymoon? That's one thing we try to be aware of, we often try not to use our phones at all during meals and a lot of times Jay will leave his in the car if we're out.
It's HOT. There is less of a breeze today up in the trees, I'm sweating and can't wait to get back to our room to go in the pool for a dip. Though by the time we get back there it will be in full sun so I won't be able to be in there for too long regardless. I've tried to be extra diligent with the sunblock since the first day when I was out for so little time without it and got burnt.
When we get back (we ended up getting a ride from about half way back because Jay didn't want to walk the whole way!) I work on the mortgage application and get it all submitted. It's the middle of the night back home so nothing will get reviewed for a while but that's fine.
We got a text from Juls and Steve that Myah got her license today!! Crazy. Of course she passed it on the first try and she drove part of the way home from the office...frightening. Jay and I both have to take the girls on their birthday so that if they both want to drive home they can - or, I guess, we are choosing to take 2 cars so they both have the opportunity to drive home if they want to. April 30th and they'll be 16!
Once Jay is done his outside nap (around 4:30pm) we go snorkelling. We decided to go PAST the breakwall today so I wore my fins, up until this point I was just wearing the mask and snorkel but the fins do actually help a lot. So we swam out an opening and Oh My God there are 1000% more fish just outside the breakwall than inside! There are SO MANY FISH. I really wish that I had brought an underwater camera or even a waterproof case for my iPhone so that we could take pictures of the fish here, I've never seen so many and so many varieties in a small area. We swam down the breakwall until the next opening and came back in - tomorrow we'll go further down a few more openings before coming back in I think.
So now it's 6:30pm, I've probably been writing for 45 mins to get this far in the day. I'll finish up tomorrow morning sometime and then add photos (which I mostly get from airdropping from Maria's phone sometime around breakfast or lunchtime for yesterdays photos! you can thank her for all the photo memories).
We went to dinner at the main restaurant, it's good and there are a lot of options (it's also free for Jay and I because of our plan). But also they'll make you something off of the Italian restaurant menu, which is closed for dinner - Jay and I wanted something light for dinner so we each ordered a double size caesar salad with chicken (the one that you get usually is a side size) and an order of fries to share. Jim and Maria shared the steak sandwich and a caesar salad too. Maria's had some work calls late this afternoon and into dinner so she's a little stressed. She did a quick estimate of their per day spending and they're WELL under the $650 a day that it was for them to add the all inclusive package that we had and they don't feel like they're holding back on ordering anything so that's good. We 100% got our value out of the $230 or so it cost us to add it because we're eating and drinking more than they are and they're spending well over that per day right now sharing most meals. They got their stay for free through points and just had to pay for the flight transfers - so they're still WAY ahead of us, lol.
We decided to have dessert tonight, which we don't usually do and they were both a bust. Jay ordered the lemongrass creme brulee which tasted like lemongrass, so it wasn't false advertising, but it was too much lemongrass. Maria and Jim got a souffle - Jay asked me before what's a souffle and I said it's basically like egg whipped and baked..it tasted like sweet scrambled eggs and was disgusting.
On the way home Jay ran ahead again and got us cool towels from the gym. There was a nice breeze tonight so it wasn't so hot. The towels are scented with lemongrass and if you sucked on them I'm sure would taste just like dessert!
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