Second verse, same as the first

Sunday started out very much like the previous day, and ended up pretty much like the previous day too! We went to the beach around 10 after a late breakfast. The breakfasts at Ocean Breeze are excellent and cooked just for us. Juice, yoghurt, bacon and eggs and lashings of fresh fruit. Once again the girls hired the tyre tubes and we sat and read in the shade of our umbrellas. We observed that we and a couple of other Australian groups we had spotted were craving the shade, while the Scandinavians, clearly not sun rich like us, were dragging their beds into the sun. This despite that fact that most of them resembled lobsters. Very fat old lobsters mind you.

In my rtropical paradise, Hua Hin, Thailand

Once again I succumbed to the lure of the beach-side massage, this time opting for the traditional Thai massage. We ate in the same restaurant and pretty much had the same food and drinks. Hey - why mess with what works?

After a while Vendor 111 caught up with me. This was a fellow selling bedspreads who yesterday I had been able to put off saying my wife was not there but today was another story. Luckily Jess liked what he had to sell. We selected the bedspread we liked and haggled the man down from his opening bid of 2500 baht to 1300. I think I paid too much. Later this was confirmed when he offered to sell me a second one for just 1000 baht.

By this stage I had run out of cash but the man said that was fine, we could pay him later. He left the goods with us, trusting us to come up with the cash. I walked back to our bungalow and asked our host (who always seems to be around) where the nearest ATM was. He said it was too far to walk. 'The boy will take you on the motorcycle.' The 'boy' was in fact a young man who is the assistant here. I jumped on the back of his bike and we were off. He took me halfway back to Hua Hin to the closest ATM. I took out some cash and so did he. While I was taking out the cash a pretty young girl emerged from a nearby shop, all smiles and came running up to greet my lift provider. He seemed very pleased to see her too. They exchanged a few words and then she held his hand for a second and went away again. 'Is that your girlfriend?' I asked him. 'Yes' he said shyly. 'She's pretty' I said. He smiled and we jumped back on the bike for the mad dash back to the beach.

After our beach adventure the kids and I wanted to take Jess to SuSaMas, so we showered and changed and headed down the road. After another great meal we all agreed that we would head into town again, but to the Hua Hin Bazaar instead of the night market. We found a tuk tuk and told the drive to take us to the bazaar. He looked a bit unsure, but conferred with another driver and then realisation struck him and he told us to jump in.

He took us straight to the night market. Clearly he had misunderstood. But no, he pointed away from the night market, across the street. As he drove off we looked where he had pointed. Sure enough, there was... a pizza shop. Not bazaar, but pizza. The girls were horrified. 'Now he thinks we're like ugly tourist who can only eat pizza' Maggie said astutely. 'Yes', I agreed. 'But I don't like that' she protested. She had a point. We are, after all, citizens of the world. Here we are at the tail end of a three month journey where we have sampled all manner of foreign delights and we are mistaken for a pizza loving red-neck. How very awful.

Trying to put that embarrassment behind us we walked to where on the map I though the bazaar is. I'm not sure if we did actually find it, but we did find lots of markets, including a different night market which had lots of great stuff. We bought quite a bit more here, the when we were tired we headed back to a spot where we had discovered foot massages for just 200 baht.

In the middle of the massage I asked Jess is she felt like a drink. 'Wouldn't that be naughty?' she asked. ' All the more reason' I replied. I checked with our masseuse who was all in favour. She called out our oder to the restaurant beside us and few minutes later our orders turned up. Mai Tais for Jess and I and soft drinks for the kids. Lovely.

When we got home Maggie reported that she hadn't seen Edward (her teddy bear) for a few days. This was a major disaster to rival my missing jacket back in Turkey. Actually it was far worse because Edward has been with Maggie since the day she was born. Her big sister Jean had picked it for her. We gathered our thoughts and realised that we must have left him behind in Barcelona. I looked at my phone which still had Spanish time on it and it was only lunch time there. I rang and asked them if they had found a missing teddy bear. They said they would check and ring me back.