Third Time Lucky in Samoa?

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Winter in Melbourne is excruciating. The football season is the only upside, but when you follow a team which has managed to win only twice in its past twenty five outings, that’s not much of an upside. We must escape.

We decide to take a two week break in the sun in apparently beautiful Samoa. We’re not quite sure why based on previous experience. We went there in 1993 with Scott when he was only eighteen months old. It was the middle of the dry season, but it bucketed with rain for the entire time. Prior to that I went there by myself for four days in the early 1980’s before I met Issy. On that very memorable trip I ate some dodgy fish at an upmarket hotel on the night I arrived, and spent the next three days on the floor in the bathroom with my head in the toilet. I wonder why we’ve decided to give Samoa another chance to impress. I think that maybe it‘s because we figure that this time it just has to be better, only because it couldn’t possibly be any worse. On reflection I’m not sure that this is all that logical. Maybe I’m tempting fate, and it will be worse. Whose to say there won’t be a cyclone or an outbreak of Ebola.

I think that our offspring have now become very hardened to us deserting them. We drag them out onto the front verandah so that they can wave goodbye to us as we drive away in the taxi, but by the time we’ve put our seatbelts on they’re nowhere to be seen.

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