Getaway

For the past five years my son has had a birthday party. His birthday falls on a national holiday in Japan so most people are off from work. That was a great excuse to have people over. While the first three were really just excuses for me to invite a bunch of my friends around for a BBQ, it was on my son's birthday, it was a party, and there were other kids there so technically, he had five birthday parties. Now he has in his mind that he gets a party every year. Add all the other birthday parties that he gets invited to by his classmates and you get a kid who expects a party for his sixth birthday. With all that working against us, my wife had the brilliant idea to leave town for the weekend.

This past weekend, we had another stay in the Mercure, the hotel we stayed in with my mother in January. This time we decided to stay for two nights so we would have a full day to relax by the pool with the water slides and play mini golf with the kids.

Overall, it worked out pretty well. The kids had off of school so my wife and kids met me at work at 3:00 and we went straight to Al Ain. We got there about 5:00 and went to the Palm sports resort and ate at the golf course club house.

We drove up the mountain and right to the hotel. We spent the whole next day swimming in the pool, riding the water slides, and playing miniature golf. The great thing about the hotel being on a mountain was that it must be fairly expensive to pump water to the top of it for water slides and a pool. I felt even better getting to the slides with two children right at 9:00 a.m. when they opened and making them turn on the slides just for us. Even though it was a little cool, I felt obligated to keep going down them until someone else arrived 10 minutes later.

In the afternoon, we drove to the top of the mountain and parked at a lookout spot. There was a 10-minute hike to the top that I didn't feel like doing in the heat with two small children, so we drove back down. I went back the next day on my own at 6:00 to see the sunrise and got photographic proof that the Chinese are taking over the world. After another morning of of mini-golf and swimming, we packed up and went to the zoo to see the robotic dinosaurs. By the time we got home in the evening, we were all pretty beat.

It was a nice weekend out but tiring. Friday night as my wife put the kids to bed, I sat at a cafe and puffed away on a shisha pipe for a few hours. that combined with waking up early to see the sunrise and all the swimming and driving really wore me out. This weekend was supposed to be a relaxing escape from the city, but ended up wearing me out more than anything.