Holidays achieve a lot of things, not least of which is to recharge your batteries from the busyness of life and work.

When I’m working I go hard.

Long hours, heaps of work travel, all-time emails, early starts, late finishes.  I’m not complaining, at all. I love my job, and it’s important to me that I do the best job I possibly can.

When I’m holidaying, I go hard too.

We squeeze as many activities and experiences (and countries!) as possible into every holiday. We always leave the day my holidays start, and invariably arrive home within hours of my leave finishing. We pack in eating, driving, site-seeing, events, side-trips, market visits, basically anything we can do, we do do.

But we also make sure we have some allocated ‘down-time’. The opportunity  to rest, to relax and to recharge. That part of this holiday starts today. My brother’s organised house-swap has still gone ahead, despite he and Lee no longer being able to come.  The home is near the small village of Sam Roi Yot, close to Pran Buri and about 40km south of Hua Hin. The house is one of about 10 in a gated community, less than a km from what’s referred to as the ‘Secret Beach’.

The house is really lovely. It’s owned by Sean, a retired UK/NZ ex-pat artist. It is a simple Thai-style home, with three separate buildings, one of which is his art studio, another a guest room with bathroom and then the larger building, which has the main (our) bedroom with ensuite, a well-equipped kitchen, a TV room and a lounge and dining area.

The outside areas include beautiful tropical gardens and a deep blue-tiled swimming pool complete with a kabana, which is the perfect spot to sit after a cooling dip in the pool.

Our original thought was that we would catch the train from Bangkok to Hua Hin so we could see the countryside and experience what the locals do. But, given the current pandemic circumstances, we thought better of it and organised a car transfer to Hua Hin. The driver picked us up at our Bangkok hotel and two and a half hours later dropped us to the Avis shop where we picked up our hire car, a white Toyota Vios, which is very similar to a Corolla.

This is where team work really comes into play in our relationship. Dave is an excellent driver, while my forte is navigation. I hear of so many couples who experience conflict while driving in unknown areas, but not us, we are the A-Team!

Sean gave us a tour of the house and a list of instructions (feed the Koi fish, close the doors to prevent snakes entering… that sort of thing) and then left us to it. We immediately jumped back in the car for a quick explore and to do some grocery shopping. It was nearly 3pm, and we hadn’t yet had lunch, so my immediate concern was to eat! Along the local beach there are quite a few road-side cafes, restaurants and resorts. We picked a place which looked over the water and seemed to be clean and well-shaded and quickly ordered a red duck curry and a soda water (me) and a hamburger with fries and a banana shake (Dave). Both were pretty good, and Dave even managed to fit in a banana split.

Next stop was Pran Buri a town of about 50,000 people 15 minutes from the house. We found the local shopping centre which had a large TESCO supermarket where we picked up some basics: bread, butter, cornflakes, eggs, bacon, milk, tea bags, soda water, crisps, bananas, tomatoes, and just in case, some toilet paper! (Truth is, we didn’t want to use Sean’s and leave him with none).

Safety is not quite the same in Thailand as it is in Australia. Look what we drove past not long after we left the supermarket! This would make the front page of SMH back home, but no one here was even really noticing :-()

A lovely swim in the pool to cool down, then home-made scrambled eggs, bacon, tomato and toast rounded out the day.

Tomorrow will be simple… some serious relaxing!  I just need to choose which of the five books I’ve downloaded on Kindle to start with.