................Taking Flight...............: Reef Cruise and Last Day in Bali

Happy Birthday Shout out to Mart!
What. A. Day.

We were running a bit behind on our schedule with such an early morning collection time. We made it to breakfast and then back to the room to grab our stuff so we could check out. The night before we made a point to ask the front desk if we could leave our bags there securely while we were on the reef cruise (they could). We had imagined we'd get a personal driver again, but we weren't sure. The driver did take Krystle's suitcase so we just followed them after we checked out. Turns out we got onto a fairly good sized bus with about 15 other people. It was a relatively short ride to the cruise departure place. We figured they'd leave our bags on the bus and then drop us back off at our hotel. We got off the bus and saw them take our bags out...so we went to go get them. We held our bags and waited in line to get our tickets. We talked to the guy who was helping us to see if there was somewhere secure to keep our bags and there was. While he was putting them away, I glanced at the itinerary and it looked different than what I had remembered; I looked again and saw it was titled "Beach Club" and not "Reef Cruise" so I told him and he had to fix our tickets and give us new ones. I'm really glad I noticed that!

We boarded the boat and had a little over an hour boat ride to our "pontoon" for the day's activities. The water was absolutely amazing. It was the bluest blue imaginable. First we found some chairs and put our towels on them. Then we went down the water slide; that was a lot of fun. After that we went "snorkeling". I just wore the snorkel and mask and looked into the water. It was quite deep so I wasn't able to touch the bottom or anything. I had borrowed John's (from soccer) camera that is able to go underwater, but hadn't been properly shown how to use it. Krystle and I just guessed what to do. (As it turns out, we only got one video out of everything we thought we were shooting. :( Kind of sad) After floating in the water for a bit, we went for lunch on the boat we came on. It was a buffet and not too bad. The desserts were really good too. After lunch we went to go sit in the sun on our chairs for a bit. Krystle fell asleep and we missed a tour to see some village on an island nearby. When she woke up we went back into the water for a little. Then, it was time to board and head back to mainland. We went to pick up our bags and then look for the driver that was going to take our location (we picked a restaurant to go to for dinner and I had the address so we gave that to them, rather than a hotel location). As it turns out, we were first to get dropped off.

It was around 5:30 and we tried to go to the restaurant, but they weren't open yet. We went next door to a jewelry shop and looked around there. Then we just sat outside and waited til 6. The restaurant was pretty fancy; we ordered our food and were pretty hungry by the time it arrived. After dinner we took a taxi back to the hotel. We were actually kind of ripped off by the taxi driver; he said it would be a flat 100,000Rp (about $10) for the drive because of the traffic. Thinking about how bad traffic had been the night before we figured it would work out okay. Turns out...the ride was really short and there was hardly any traffic. Oh well. We sat by the pool at the hotel until about 11:30 or so.