This morning started just like yesterday morning, the girls playing with their new toys, me blogging, breakfast, laundry, dishes, all the usual stuff… Then suddenly, around 9.30am, Joe looks at me as if he’s had enough of Chill Christmas, and asks me “what do you want to do today?”. And that’s how we ended up finding and deciding to travel to a new-to-us beach, about 15 minutes away by taxi!
We stop in front of a super cute Beach Resort and Restaurant, and hesitate. Surely this can’t be the beach access for just anybody? But Joe says it is, so we enter the gardens. There are several buildings, and we walk past a pool with sunloungers, before we find the stairs down to the beach.
It’s windy. It is very, very windy. There are angry and unrelenting waves crashing onto the beach. Joe says the tide is coming in, and that’s why there are so many waves. We leave our belongings and our sandals in the shade of a coconut palm, and venture down the sand to dip our toes in the ocean.
The beach here is pretty nice! But where are the other people? We see a few people here and there in the distance, but we are alone. All alone. Joe thinks there’s a nicer beach just around the fishing boats directly south of this stretch of beach, and goes to explore. He comes back to report his findings: this is the nicest stretch of beach there is.
We don’t have any real buckets or shovels, but we did bring an empty yogurt container from the AirBnb, and I fill it with wet sand for the girls to build with. They start trying to build a castle, but have no examples to look at, nor help from mom or dad. Then they decide the middle mound is the entire castle, and try to dig a moat, which I fill with water. The water lasts all of a second and a half before soaking into the sand. Sigh.
Joe sees a couple drive up to the resort on a motorbike, and go lay down on the sunloungers. Hey, if they can, maybe we can too? He goes to ask, and finds out that the pool, restaurant and sunloungers are for anyone to enjoy, provided we make a purchase from the restaurant. We order fruit smoothies and an iced tea, and the girls and I hop in the pool to cool off. It feels so refreshing after the hot, windy and sandy beach!
To begin with, it’s just us and the earlier couple by the pool. They are from England and here for a vacation. Soon thereafter, a family arrives on the other side of the pool, speaking Norwegian! As the afternoon progresses, another family arrives, also Norwegian, and then another, not Norwegian.
We order lunch. Our smoothies took an eternity to arrive, so we settle back into our sunloungers to dry off before heading over to the garden “dining room” to eat. The girls both order sandwiches with fries, and Joe and I decide to split a deep fried soft shell crab salad. Let me just state the obvious: salads are NOT a great choice in a gale.
Joe and I fully expected the girls’ dishes to be too big for them, and for us to have their leftovers to add to our own lunch, but no such luck today. Our salad arrives, and it’s literally a small crab, deep fried in all its soft shelled glory, but it’s lettuce leaves and shaved cucumbers, which are NOT very heavy, and we share liberally with the lawn. The wind is adamant we are not having a full salad today.
After lunch and back over in the pool area, Téa manages to exclaim “this is the best winter ever”! Those are the moments we feel like we’ve made the right choice, taking them away from everything they know. But when they get upset, like when mom says “it’s time to get out of the pool” (which happens once a day, every day), I also hear “mom, I want to go home”, and we don’t have one, other than whatever AirBnb we’re staying in at the moment. Those moments are … not as great.
We stay at the beach resort until about 3pm, swimming, lounging, enjoying the view. It’s so beautiful and relaxing, and sunny and hot. I keep hoping that I put enough SPF on this morning… We finally book a car to take us back home, where we shower and get ready for yet another Tamarind dinner.
Tamarind opens at 5pm, and they’re open Thursday through Sunday every week, which means we’ve essentially had night market dinners four days per week since we got here. Over the New Years week, they are open Tuesday through Sunday, so we only have to come up with a different solution ONE night before we leave Hua Hin!
We get to the market at our usual 5.15pm, and it is already getting busy. It is almost like the vendors aren’t quite ready for 5pm to be busy, and all our orders take 15 minutes or more before they are ready to be picked up. Thank goodness for our smoothies! They are always the first thing I get, because once the vendor gets buys, it can be a long wait for smoothies.
Not pictured:
Téa’s braised pork steamed bao burger, a repeat favourite.
My seafood Pad Thai. It was really good, but it took so long to arrive, I was starving and attacked it the minute it hit the table.
Joe’s Schezuan skewers, the last thing to arrive at the table, and we were too hungry to remember to take pictures.
After Tamarind, we head home and have another movie night. We bought microwave popcorn at the grocery store yesterday, and Téa has discovered the magic of hot buttery popcorn out of the microwave. At home we use an air popper, and it’s never quite the same… So all in all, pretty perfect ending to the best day ever!