Wednesday 5 April 2017

Spring Break staycation?

We are currently on Spring Break here in the UAE. The kids have had off last week and this week. Lo and behold, Nathan was also on leave last week, so we were of course hoping to get away for a bit. I really looked forward to a bit of traveling, especially since I hadn't been out of the sandpit for nearly four months...

Our initial plan was to go to New York, but it got canned when we couldn't firm up any tickets in time. Plan B was to return to Brunei but that didn't work out either as we waited too long to make travel plans and some of our friends by then had accepted other visitors, and some others had decided to travel themselves. *Duh*. We looked at Singapore, but again, no firm tickets and with only one flight a day we couldn't chance it with stand by.
In the end we were planning to just go to the airport and basically hop onto any plane with free seats, anywhere; but first we had to quickly sort out some admin regarding the renewal of our house rental.

The whole process was started on the Sunday before the holidays. We needed to apply for a specific piece of paper which we needed for the company to renew the visas of the kids and I. Without renewed visas we weren't going to be able to travel. But even after having been back to that same office EVERY day that week, queuing for hours each time, we got nowhere. The system let us down so bad, and we were stuck.
So school was out, Nathan's leave had started and as the days passed and we got increasingly frustrated we started to accept that we were looking at having to do a staycation.

But, last Tuesday we had a break-through and managed (after another five hours of queuing at different desks in the Immigration Head Office) to get our visas renewed, ourselves. Yay!
So 17.30 in the afternoon we finally could start looking at somewhere to go. Considering we didn't have many days left together, our choices were slim - in the end it stood between a beach holiday in the Seychelles, or going up to Denmark.
Well, as I spend most of my days doing nothing anyway, and we get enough sun and sand here - we ended up speed packing Tuesday night, to be sat on an Emirates plane to Copenhagen early Wednesday morning.

More about our trip, in the next few posts!

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