Cutting it very close

It has been 10 days since I returned from a very short holiday in Singapore. How short was it, you may ask. Well, is a three-days, two-nights stay considered short enough? In my opinion, yes, because there are lots of things to do in Singapore. Of course, many people will dispute me saying this but all I can say to them is that you've got to make your own time interesting. If not, then your holiday will be boring.

Anyway, what happened is that my brother-in-law and his wife and kid, my sister-in-law and her husband, and my wife and I flew down to Singapore with my mother-in-law after months of persuading her to go visit her eldest son there. To my mother-in-law, two nights to anywhere outside Penang would be considered very long for her already. Ideally, she would prefer to fly into Singapore in the morning and return by night time. She is that homely a person. And the danger with her is that she was liable to change her mind at the last minute. We told her no way could she back out from the trip because the flight tickets have been bought and the hotel rooms booked. So finally, the extended family vacation for the eight of us became a reality. 

We went on Friday and came back on Sunday. There were anxious moments for my wife and I before the two flights. On the day of our departure, we were supposed to pick up my brother-in-law and family from their house in Bandar Tasek Mutiara at 6.30am. But horrors! Something went awry with the alarm clock and my wife woke me up ay 6.25am. We're late, we're late, she told me frantically. Her mobile alarm did not go off and for some strange reason, my own mobile phone went into a reset mode. Whatever sleep vanished from our eyes. We phoned her brother and told him to drive separately to the airport. We would join them there. Luckily, we had fully packed our bags the night before, It was only a matter of us washing up and loading up the luggage into the car. We did all that within 20 minutes. We left the house and hoped that there would be no traffic congestion on the Penang Bridge or the roads around the Bayan Lepas Free Trade Zone. There were none.

The other anxious moment was our return on Sunday. We cut it too close going to Changi airport. Our flight was at 2.55pm and I hadn't even printed our boarding passes. But I finally managed to get it down by 1.15pm. Then it was a rush for lunch which we managed to complete by two o'clock. I was a nervous wreck and had no appetite to complete my meal, but the rest of my group was oblivious to it. Afterwards, we had to rush to the boarding gate. I asked my mother-in-law to sit in a wheelchair and we followed my brother-in-law in search of the gate with the rest in tow behind us. As luck would have it, the gate had to be he farthest away. Except for five more persons lingering there, there were no more passengers. I heaved a big sigh of relief when everyone of us boarded.