All right,I know this is a little late but...OK. More than a little but I have some good excuses. Yes.......Plural! First coming back from holiday it took some time to get all the films developed. Secondly, my computer died, just the processing unit, so I bought a new one. A week later the screen died, leading to more expense. Then lastly, to complete the three Our cat died. Asti - Cat-Astrophe to give her her full name has been living with my in-laws for the last two years as my wife and I didn't think an elderly cat would easily move to a new country, a new flat and cat litter after living in a house with her garden out the back. I won't trouble you with the medical details, lets just say she went quickly, but it was strange how helpless we felt. It was our cat, but a thousand miles away. As a result all we could do was hope and pray. When we got the news it was upsetting but hard to realize.

That's enough of excuses. We've been on holiday and unless you've met me or my wife in the last few weeks you won't yet have been bored witless by our blathering on about it, interminably. We've been to The Maldives. Yes I know; it was almost as much of a surprise to us too. So how did it happen? Well at the end of June we found ourselves with a limited budget, an urge to go away and no idea where to go. This state of affairs continued for some time, occasionally one of us would make a half hearted suggestion and the other would respond with "maybe" or "nah" or "don't fancy that" or some other encouraging statement and so it would have continued if we hadn't, one Saturday, visited the Travel office on my wife's works where we found they had a list of all the late availability bargains. Looking through all those for Rhodes, Corfu and Ibiza we noticed a couple for The Maldives, including one we could afford. Now this being Switzerland the company was closed on Saturday so the following Monday saw us meeting outside the office at lunch time to find out more.

The place was called Lohifushi Island Resort Was approximately an hour and a half from the Airport, by boat. It was a large Island with almost 300 bungalows, it's own Dive School, football pitch, sports complex, various restaurants, bars etc. A tropical island 4 degrees north of the Equator and the flight there was direct. It took us....Oooooooh...all of 30 seconds to say YES, We want it! just one small problem. We had three weeks to organize everything. Permission for time off at such short notice was relatively easy for my wife but It really messed up my work. However my boss was brilliant and said yes too.

Next Page