Extended family Phuket trip Nov 2012

As mentioned before, this Phuket trip took place in Nov, which is more than a month ago, but due to the huge number of photos by 3 cameras+i-phone, I have problem deciding what to write about and which photo to post.

There are 3 bloggers amongst us, and Winny and Lixing have already blogged about this trip.  After reading their postings, I have decided to piggy back on there post and do my the simplified and "free style" one.  **So thanks gals and I will point my other readers to your blog, ok?

This trip was supposed to be for 4 families, but because Mavis and Mabel came down with Chicken-pox, their family of 5 withdrew, so we end up with 3 families:
(i) WK, Lynn, Me and WK mum:

(ii) Derrick, Brayden, Winny, Chloe and Derrick's Mum:

(iii) Nanny's family - Lixing, Daniel (Qiu Yun's nephew), Qiu Yun, Mr Tan and JJ :


I'm a sucker for extended family trip. In Dec 2011, I brought up this subject with my 2 SIL and BIL. We discussed places like HK, Taiwan, Korea, Genting, Phuket, etc. But extended family trip is very difficult to organise. So I must say a very very BIG thank you to Winny for organising this and the April HK trip. Both were very successful.

For this Phuket trip, our accommodation was 2 private villas. One of the villas has 4 rooms and the other one has 3 rooms, and each comes with a pool. Each room can take 2 pax and each villa can add one or two extra bed. There's also the option to "open" less rooms and pay less. For example, Winny and our family stayed in the villa with 4 rooms, and we only uses 3 rooms, thus we didn't have to pay the rates for the unopened room. QY and family stayed at the villa with 3 rooms, but only open 2 rooms. Technically the operator can rent the other rooms to other people at the same time, but I think the chances of that happening is low. At least it didn't happen to us, so we pay for 5 rooms and enjoy 2 villas to ourselves.

I like this trip more than the HK trip because (i) I like resort/beach holidays and (ii) it's very heart warming to have our 2 families and the Nanny's family sharing such close and fun relationship and holiday. Fate has really brought us 3 women (and families) together.. Here's 2 photos of Qiu Yun with her own and her "other" kids:
QY and kids at pool:

QY and kids in living room


We did not take any big group photo.  Here's one photo of us gathering around the table for dinner on the first day that we arrived. One of the plus point for this villa stay is that dinner and breakfast's being prepared and cooked at our villas' kitchen by the villa staff, so that the "aunties and mummies" in the families can sit back and enjoy, except maybe for feeding the children, which we were preparing to do below:

(I wonder who took this pic, cos all the bloggers are in this pic???)


For more detail on the villa, refer to Winny's blog postings:
http://aquariusstoria.blogspot.sg/2012/12/two-villa-holiday-phuket.html
http://aquariusstoria.blogspot.sg/2012/11/phuket-4-days-3-nights-relaxing-villa.html

As for Lixing's blog, her's is a young adult's way of expressing her thoughts:
http://lxingg.blogspot.sg/2012/12/long-story.html

Sometimes I feel like commenting on her postings, but then I want to refrain from doing that too. It's for each of us to experience for ourselves the ups and downs, joy and pain of 18/19 going on 20s.. 

Lynn and Chloe love their Jie Jie:

An interesting photo taken by Winny:


In the Villa, Lynn and her cousins had lots of fun in the bath tub too.  Here's 2 "sexy" pic of Lynn:



I remember there were some photos of the rose petals that the kids sprinkled into their bubble bath tub, but I just can't find them.   Here's Lynn's collection in the mineral water bottle:


On day 2, we went to the beach.
http://aquariusstoria.blogspot.sg/2012/12/surin-beach-phuket.html
The waves at the beach was very strong. I don't know if it's so the whole year round, or only this time of the year. Lynn didn't go in the sea until we wanted to get on a jet ski. When Lynn and myself couldn't get on the get ski because of the huge waves (JJ and Daniel went with WK in our place), we played at the shore line for awhile. Here's a pic of her head awash with sand

Winny took a few pics of me, and these pics turn out very nice.





The beach trip lasted for half a day, and we went back to the Villa for the afternoon.  That night, we went for seafood dinner and stroll:
http://aquariusstoria.blogspot.sg/2012/12/lotus-restaurant-phuket.html

We took a full day tour package on day 3.  The first stop was a temple.
http://aquariusstoria.blogspot.sg/2012/12/wat-phra-thong-or-golden-buddha-temple.html

I like a lot of those pics taken by Winny and Lixing of the temple (very artistic and tranquil), and had a hard time deciding which to post.  In the end, I will just post 2 pics taken by ... myself, haha..

Purple pom-pom flower on her hair

Temple window

The next stop was Elephant ride.
http://aquariusstoria.blogspot.sg/2012/12/an-exciting-and-different-elephant-ride.html

It's my first, so I enjoyed it tremendously.  Some parts of it were down slope and up slope on muddy path, so it's rather interesting.  There are tonnes of pics on the ride, so here's just ONE:

Afterwards, it was a visit to the butterfly garden.  Most of us were not interested as we need to pay to enter, so only I took the 2 girls in for a spin while the rest relax at the cafe.  Here's a pic of a butterfly resting on Lynn's pants:

For our lunch, we went to a restaurant on a hill: http://aquariusstoria.blogspot.sg/2012/12/tunk-ka-cafe-restaurant-phuket.html.  The photos of the 3 families which I posted above were taken here after finishing our lunch.  Other than those, the ones the got most pics here were WK and myself.  Again, winny took these 2 beautiful pic of us:



These 3 are from my iPhone. Not that great in technique and quality, full of wrinkles and saggy skin, but very fun and natural:

I love this pic too:


In the afternoon, on our way from one place to another, I snapped this pic that proved there that PSY is all over the world:

We did some shopping at 2 different places in the afternoon.  Finally, we were suppose to watch sunset at Karon View point, but it was too cloudy that day.
http://aquariusstoria.blogspot.sg/2012/12/karon-viewpoint-phuket.html

Here's some final pics I'm sharing for this great holiday:

WK mum:

Derrick and mum:








Really hope that we will have one with the whole family soon..   

Wow, took me 3 hours to write this....