Annual Family Holiday Down South

Last weekend was a long weekend for us and what a weekend it was!

The 'holiday' started early for Joe with a school trip to Zoo Negara on Thursday. After having visited the Honolulu Zoo in 2008, Melbourne Zoo in 2009 and Singapore Zoo in 2010, he finally visited our local zoo this year.

The next day (Friday) was a post-outing school holiday. Since Daalin was also on his Easter mid-semester break and I don't work on Fridays, we drove down to Yong Peng, arriving just in time to watch the Royal Wedding live on TV.

I find Yong Peng relaxing because the kids can entertain themselves and I don't have to do house chores :-)

The next morning, we made our way to Desaru and checked into Lotus Desaru Resort. We picked this resort mainly because it's located in Johor, has many-rooms apartments and something to entertain the boys.

The resort water park with a long water slide was certainly the highlight for the boys.
At night, we celebrated Ah Mah's birthday.

While the boys spent morning and evenings at the waterpark, my princess preferred to stay dry and close to me.

She certainly found Tua Pek's iPad more entertaining.

The boys loved this coconut too. But my princess was terrified of it!

The coconut tips over with a big splash when full....Joe thought it was great fun!

Besides all the water fun, there was a lot of iPhone and iPad and Wii time and of course just chit chatting and enjoying family company.

We had all our meals in the hotel room. Ah Mah was a fantastic Food Minister. She brought frozen nasi briyani, beef rendang, char siew, devil chicken, boneless roast duck and a lot of other stuff.

We even had sushi-making in the hotel room!I think the hotel staff might have freaked out if they had seen us carrying in the rice cooker, hot plate, pots and huge ice-boxes (filled with frozen food). Lucky for us, they didn't.

On Monday, we checked out and left the hotel at 11.30am, arriving in Yong Peng at 2pm. After a late lunch, Daalin took a short nap while I packed our car and fed the kids milk.

We departed Yong Peng at 4pm and the drive home was certainly one of the most pain-in-the-rear-end ones for me. Around Tangkak, a milk truck crashed to the road side creating a 5km jam because busybody Malaysians stopped their cars on the emergency lane to loot the milk.

Then it wasn't even 6pm when my son surprised me by saying he was starving. We stopped at the Ayer Keroh overhead rest stop to tar pau KFC. There was a huge crowd and long queue at KFC. Then it poured heavily when we wanted to leave.

Just after entering the highway again, there was another jam due to another accident.

We finally passed Seremban at about 8pm and traffic slowed down again....all because of an accident on the south bound lane!!! It took us 45 minutes to cover the stretch between Seremban and Nilai.

KL was jam-free and we got home at 9.30pm. It took 5.5 hours for what normally takes under 2.5 hours!

Joseph wants to go to Lotus Desaru again....

We'll see..... maybe when the Senai-Desaru highway opens, and it's off-peak period.

He sure did enjoy himself though.... family time is great!