The long weekend last week provided us with an opportunity to venture out of Bangkok for a short  family weekend getaway from Bangkok by booking ourselves a 3-day, 2 night stay at a resort in Chaam. It was a rather last minute decision and given the long weekend where Bangkok residents would have booked all of the hotels in advance, we were indeed quite lucky to be able to find ourselves a reasonably-priced accommodation at quite a short notice.

Chaam is about 200 km away, south of Bangkok and pretty easy to get to. Under normal circumstances, it should be a straight-forward place to get to and driving can be done in under 3 hours. However, as last Friday happened to be a long weekend, it also means that most of Bangkok residents would also take the opportunity to get out of town. As a result, traffic was heavy and very unfortunately for us, we got caught in really, really slow-moving traffic.

 

We should have left home earlier, but because I had to be activated for urgent work that needed to be done, we were delayed for about half an hour. We left home closer to 10 am and it didn’t take long before we had to join in the crawling traffic almost all the way to Chaam. We weren’t even halfway there even after spending more than 3 hours in the car, making me feel really  anxious that the kids would get impatient and would start wailing their guts out soon enough. To their credit, both fell asleep during the drive.  Although the nap did not last very long, I  thanked my lucky stars that Spud did not wake up from her nap wailing her guts off like she always does after a nap.

2 rambunctious kids,2 rest-stops,  3 U-Turns, 2 exhausted parents and 5 hours later, we finally arrived at our destination, The Regent Chalet Chaam. We had a nice place to house ourselves for the weekend and the kids were again excited at the prospect of being able to create absolute mayhem as they found out that they will be  sleeping in the same room.

 

We spent the rest of the afternoon after checking ourselves in the room by walking on the beach collecting seashells before setting ourselves at a nearby restaurant for dinner. While Spud enjoyed her little walks on the sand scouring seashells, Squirt refused to step on the sand under any circumstances and was scared of the waves from the sea. He was not too happy walking anywhere on the sand or near the water, and was adamant about not wanting to move an inch when he had his feet on the sandy beach. He refused to do anything with the sand saying that it’s “dirty” and “itchy” and only wanted to be carried.

With so much excitement happening during the day, the kids were clearly over-stimulated and over-tired. Bedtime was a mad-house with both kids bouncing off the walls,  climbing in and out of bed for the hundredth time, laughing, screaming, screeching with each other, and us losing our heads trying to get both to stay IN bed and stay quiet.

It took us 2 hours to finally be able to settle them down and we did so by not leaving their room. By the time the last kid closed his eyes,  it was 9.30 pm  –  way, way, way past their usual 6.30 pm bedtime.

We both were  knackered we could hardly move.

It was only Day 1.

Related post(s):
Chaam Day 2

Chaam Day 3

Chaam- The Regent Chalet Review