"I get knocked down, but I get up again"

I saved up for ages to hire out a beautiful beach villa for Alun and I to celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary in.

I saw “Studio 9” for hire at Eagle Bay, which piqued my interest because we’d not been there before. It looked amazing, so I booked it.

Here are the pics:

Once we’d dropped our bags off and were done exploring the studio apartment, Alun and I headed down to the beach.

We stayed to watch the sunset and headed back to Studio 9 to have dinner and settle in for the night. The bed was so soft and comfortable. I’ll have to look at the tags on the pillows, I’d definitely like to buy some for at home.

The next day, we went on wine and beer tour. It’s a popular thing to do down South and Alun and I had been to 2 beforehand, so I was looking forward to seeing pretty vineyards and awesome breweries while Al was happy he’d get to have my “samples” because I don’t drink. Haha.

We’ve come away from each tour with lasting friendships, so we were both looking forward to making new mates, too.

Here are some pics:

The tour was titled “Beer, wine, cider and Gin” so that’s why I booked it; thinking it would be nice to try out 4 different types of alcohol (well, for Al anyway) and see different types of places. The tour was a new business and from the get-go, it was a mess.

The driver was an hour and a half late (!!!) picking us up, which meant that instead of 6 visits around the southwest, we were suddenly down to 5. The tour guide was brand new and took ages finding each winery, often having to make u-turns or stop by the side of the road to call his boss and ask for guidance.

Praise God, we were all really patient and gave Sean a lot of support throughout the tour. I think he was lucky we all didn’t demand our money back, the tour itself was disorganised and disappointing. We all felt so jipped but were good sports about it. I’m proud of us.

Instead of visiting vineyards, brewing companies, and good old-fashioned pubs (Al’s favourites), we went to 5 wineries and sampled the same sets of red and white wines. I asked Sean by the 3rd winery when we were going to see some semblance of beer and Sean looked exhausted and fed up, saying, “I don’t know”.

We didn’t get to sample any beer at all in the end. Or cider. We talked amongst ourselves and found out a few couples had paid for the “Gourmet wine tour” while the rest of us had paid more to go on the “beer, wine, cider and gin tour”. The tour owner didn’t ask us, but sneakily lumped a lot of us into the wrong tour and was hoping we wouldn’t mind.

We all minded very much!!! It would have been nicer if Paul (the owner) had just told us he’d been unable to organise the tout with beer and cider, refunded our extra money and asked our patience as this was all new to him. We could have worked with that. Instead, 8 out of the 11 of us were ripped off and pretty unhappy by the last stop when it was clear noone was getting a pint of lager.

Sigh.

The pros were that we all cheered each other up, we laughed almost the entire time on tour, sang together on the bus and were firm friends by the last stop off. We were all extremely well behaved and all very kind to Sean who looked lost, angry and exhausted.

All’s well that ends well?

It’s 8:22am on Sunday and we check out at 11am. I’m awake; so I’ll pack our things and tidy up while Alun sleeps so that all he has to do when he wakes (I’ve set his alarm for 10:30am) is get up, get dressed and we’ll head home.