Swimming to our Fateful Destiny

Day 6-May 5

Bora Bora-Finally, we have a chill day. A day where nothing is really happening, it’s just chill. Until I had my own personal crisis, that is. The day started off normal, just another day in Bora Bora. We caught a ride to the restaurant for breakfast and had our normal breakfast of made to order eggs and lots of buffet selections including breads, pancakes, French toast, sausage, cheese, bacon, salmon, and assorted other typical American breakfast foods. We sat, ordered our eggs, got our buffet foods, ate and then sat and talked. After breakfast, Dianne found us a nice couple of lounge chairs on the beach and I went to the room for a few minutes with the computer before heading back and lounging with Dianne. Dianne suggested we take a swim, so we did. The water was great. We wondered around the cove, just talking and chilling. After awhile, maybe twenty to thirty minutes, we headed back to the lounge chairs. After about ten minutes, I wanted to take a picture with my phone, but where was my phone? Oh, there it is in my back pocket. Wait, what, my back pocket. You mean the same back pocket that I just took swimming. What the… I just went swimming with my phone in my back pocket? Oh crap. Oh good, it’s still working. That was my first mistake. I should have turned off my phone that very instant, found some rice, and let it dry out. But it was working. For now… We decided to take a kayak out, complimentary at the Four Seasons, for the first hour anyway, and rowed all around the resort area, including all the way back over to our bungalow on the other side of the resort, against the current and straight into the teeth of eastern wind. The wind blows. It blows hard. I thought we got away from the wind when we left Kansas, you know, the people of the south wind, but no. It’s here as well and one difference is it doesn’t slow down, not even at nice. So we rowed. After about 45 minutes of our allotted one hour, we returned the kayak and went back to our lounge chairs. Dianne grabbed my phone and showed me it was dead… NNNNOOOOO! Yep, deader than a doornail and very hot to the touch. All those pictures I’ve been taking on this trip, gone. My contacts, my apps, my Airalo data service purchased for French Polynesia, all gone. I could think of nothing else but getting my phone on a charger. Maybe the battery had just died. Now, that’s some serious wishful thinking. I had to get back to the room! On my way, I ran into a gentleman who worked in the conceriage office, explained the situation to him and he offered to get me some rice to absorb the moisture. It may be futile, but it’s my only hope of recovering all those memories, data and other information. For now, I wait.

We were invited to dinner with Jimmy and Pam and some newly arrived travel mates, Brad and Lori, AKA BL, and some folks we hadn’t met before, Tom and Debbie, AKA TD. Brad had made reservations at the eclectic asian cuisine restaurant, Vaimiti, on the grounds of the Four Seasons hotel. Tom ordered both white and red wine for the table. I didn’t try the white, but the red wine was very good. After some time, we all ordered appetizers and dinner. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Oh, here comes our appetizer. Then we waited. And waited. And the waited some more. Yea, here comes our food. Now don’t get me wrong, the food was good, but damn! We arrived at 6:00 PM for a 6:00 PM dinner reservation for eight and didn’t leave until 9:45 PM. Almost three hours of dinner. We really enjoyed the friendship and company, but Dianne and I had planned to spend some alone time on our deck, drinking wine and dancing. That didn’t happen. The real question now is, “Will my phone work?”

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But the evening wasn’t quite over just yet. We were invited to Steve and Summer’s, henceforth SS, bungalow for a nightcap and in my case, a good cigar. The bourbon was really an expensive bottle of Jack Daniels, but it went pretty well with the cigar. Summer and I sat on the deck watching the stars go by, talking politics. Inside, there was quite a conversation including pictures of Summer’s boobs right after reconstructive surgery. Oh my! We walked all the way from bungalow 228 back to our bungalow 416. Let me tell you, that was a very long walk. We said good night to Jimmy and Pam and went straight to bed. We were both exhausted, and maybe had a bit too much to drink.

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