Once upon a time Emily, Brooke, Daiva, Erinn and I decided to go on a little adventure.
We were in the beautiful Philippines, surrounded by hundreds of islands, and we decided we would go on a little mini-vacation to visit one of them.
On the Race, it’s pretty rare to get a couple days off in a row so we jumped at the opportunity to have an overnight adventure.
We headed to Lakawon Island. A tiny island completely covered by a resort, of sorts.
The process of getting to Lakawon was something out of a comedy movie. A long bus ride, and a moto ride to the middle of nowhere, where we were supposed to catch a boat. It was raining the entire time and we were hopeful that it might stop soon… We had no idea that we were in the middle of a typhoon.
We roll up to the boat ticket office, completely soaked from the moto ride, and they tell us the news: because of the storm, there will be no boats that day.
We were shocked- we had just traveled hours, we could see the island a mile or so off shore… so close but so far!
We weren’t sure what to do then but a couple of us wanted to try waiting out the storm. So, we waited. The staff members were rightly confused as to why we were waiting- it’s a typhoon, there will be no boats.
But we waited.
After an hour or so of waiting in the rain, we see a boat head out from the island. It’s the off season so there aren’t very many people on the island at all but a couple of the tourists who were there had insisted on being brought back to the main island. We got our boat!
Not going to lie, I thought we were going to die. What, from the shore, looked like a relatively calm sea became a nightmare as we got a little off shore. I closed my eyes and prayed- that we wouldn’t die (or throw up!)
We got there safely, praise God!
On the island, they were in the process of renovating some of the buildings and building others but, other than the workers and staff, we realized we had almost the whole island to ourselves.
So began our weekend retreat. It was chilly and it rained almost constantly, but we had so much fun walking along the shore, drinking coffee, and relaxing with good friends.
The ride home was about 5 times worse than the ride there (think: hours on a stop-and-go bus, soaking wet from our boat ride back to the mainland) but I would’ve done it again, no question!
