Diary for Busy Doing Nothing


Surprise Surprise

2017-12-16 to 2018-01-02

What a time we had at Christmas and New Year.  Firstly, we had house guests for 3 nights that we’d never met before.  Then a quiz night where we finished Numero Uno. We had 2 boat trips in less than a week including The Santa Special and that was all before Christmas Day.  Finally, we have a massive surprise for you all from New Years Eve.   

Now, to put some meat on the above summary of events.  Graham and Jean contacted us via TripAdvisor about a review of a guesthouse that we stayed at in The Philippines.  That was in 2015 and since then we’ve been reading each other’s blogs and picking each other’s brains for ideas on various trips.  When they said they wanted to visit Benaulim we had no hesitation in offering one of our spare rooms.  We really enjoyed their company, winning the regular Monday night quiz along with Jeff and Mary and then took them on a relatively sedate dolphin cruise – sedate because they were flying home that night.

A couple of days later we were on The Santa Special – definitely not sedate!  A great day partying and dancing and some of us, not mentioning any Cheryl’s, slightly over indulged the G&T’s and didn’t quite remember clambering into bed as soon as we got home at about 3.30PM.  To be fair, she did manage to get up for a light dinner that was washed down with a plain soda.  The boat trip was fantastic with Santa handing out the usual joke presents, we had Christmas songs before dancing music all of which took us hours to put together on a USB.  Special thanks to Hugh for also downloading loads of music for us.

For various reasons we’re trying a new shack, Café Arbat, and before Christmas lunch Neil had his customary couple of beers and quiet time to remember his mum and dad.  Then we had our Christmas lunch of chicken tikka and prawns wrapped in bacon or better known at home at Christmas as prawns in blankets and all washed down with a bottle of sauvignon blanc…..delicious.  Then, to our surprise the shack handed us two pieces of plumb cake…..wow, a cross between Christmas Cake and Christmas Pudding!  It was so good we did our best impression of Oliver Twist…’please Soro can we have some more’?

After lunch we had calls with Leanne & Neil, Paul and Alex & Freddy before setting off to meet friends in another shack for sundowners and Bee’s homemade mince pies with brandy.  Bee and Dave gave us the card that we should have received 2 years ago……that brought a lot of laughs.  So, can it get any better?  Well, yes it can.  What better way to top a fantastic day than on our way home sharing a simple dinner of our favourite beef vindaloo with plain roti in a restaurant we’ve passed by for 10 years and only discovered this trip.  What a cracking day.

On New Years Eve there was the usual beach party at Rex’s which promised a super moon and a number of people mooning at the moon plus lots of fireworks.  Sadly, the moon wasn’t that super and the actual moon set was even less super but the fireworks were great. 

Now here’s the big New Years Eve surprise.  As the fireworks were going off at midnight Cheryl accepted Neil’s marriage proposal……yes, were getting married!  We enjoyed the rest of the party getting home about 4.30am.  We didn’t say anything to anybody about our secret as we wanted to let the children know first.  Now of course, you’ve all read this and now you know!  Happy New Year.