Two
Phuket. Two days. Two times lucky.
Two days — that’s the number of days we missed the tsunami by. Zuzan and I were in Phuket from Dec 21st 2004 to Dec 24th 2004. Zuzan wanted to extend our vacation by at least a day, but I nixed that idea because not only was she coughing (and vomiting occassionally) badly, I myself was coming down with a fever and cough. We found out later that she had bronchitis (and I caught it too). I never thought I would ever think, how lucky for us to get bronchitis! If we had extended our stay for an extra day, maybe we would have extended it for another day also… who knows. The bronchitis cutting short our vacation was our *second* lucky break actually.
Two times lucky — our first lucky break was cancelling our initial plans to go to Phuket during the Christmas weekend! I suggested to Zuzan, to invite her cousin Manja and hubby Zep along for our getaway weekend also. We wanted to take advantage of the Christmas long weekend, but Manja had only one day off left for the year, and could not get anymore time off. We then shifted our plans so that we went earlier during the week (although we wanted to take the Christmas weekend also, so we can spend more time together since I am in town only 12 days, instead of having to go through the inevitable invites to family functions during the holiday weekend).