From the Pen with love: A Manila-based R&R

I was silent on our way back to Manila. I was thinking, this vacation ended without even having started. My hunny and I went to Tagaytay Maundy Thursday, with some hope that we'd get time for ourselves for some R&R together.

Traffic was terrible in Tagaytay - in my hunny's words, it looked like everyone else from Metro Manila had the same idea. It took us over an hour to get to Tagaytay, through South Superhighway, but spent more than an hour persevering the slow movement somewhere between Silang and Tagaytay. We took late lunch at his favorite restaurant and thought that we could spend a night in Tagaytay… we first had to look for a place to check in, take some afternoon siesta, then resume prowling the city in the evening. With the afternoon traffic being so terrible, we thought that was the better option.

I know only of a few hotels with decent accommodations in Tagaytay; the old Taal Vista Lodge (I don't remember its current name) might be too pricey. There was this Tagaytay Country Hotel that PNAC once used for a workshop. It was decent enough so we checked it out. We got there after thirty minutes (what would usually be around 10 minutes commute) and all rooms were booked except for their suites and a large 10-guest capacity room. I think we felt we should check other options - another in mind was Tagaytay Dacha (another that PNAC once used). But we never got there. It's a bust, this Tagaytay vacation idea. Essentially, for the last three or four hours we spent in the city, we only spent an hour for the R&R - that was the late lunch.

I was silent all the way home, I was angry. I felt envious of all the other people who might have had their R&R the way they wanted it, my two bff's included. Gregg was having his with out-of-town friends (his other barkada) in Subic/Olongapo, just a week after an extended vacation in Boracay and Iloilo. (Currently unemployed but "pensioned" courtesy of his bagbag's generosity, I recently baptized him "Goldie.") Eon's vacation went to him. He was oblivious to everything else while at home relishing his non-ending "afternoon delights." (Well, at least, he and his "vacation package" got to do the spring cleaning we never had.) Gregg actually extended his vacation invite to me, but after learning what the out-of-town friends expected that he drags with him, I thought otherwise - "bring all the cute guys." Nope, that's not for me.

All the while, while I was sulking and mulling over the possibility that Jesus actually wanted me to do a pious Catholic Holy Week routine, my hunny was cooking something up for a surprise. On Good Friday, hunny and I checked in at Peninsula Manila. Sometime between Thursday evening and Friday morning he was actually studying this option; while sulking, I was throwing him bored stares, trying to send out an "are you out of your mind?!" unspoken message. Friday morning, all was set, he made the reservations, packed our bags, almost literally hauled my ass off the bed and headed for the Pen. I was blinking and unbelieving up to the concierge counter.

My penny-pinching alterego was shouting in my head, this could be just the most expensive "vacation" we will be having in our almost-eight years of being together. But I was also considering how much I sensed his resolve all through this; for a change, he took charge of the details (which he was usually passive on). I was silently loving him as he threw the questions, brandished this-and-that cards, filled out the forms. He knew I wanted our time together, that I really wanted it badly. So it was true, this vacation didn't come cheap at all, but I got what I hoped for: just the two of us, doing essentially very ordinary things, not a care in the world, and housed inside what I believe as one of the best rooms I've checked in so far (even compared to those I had in Bangkok and elsewhere). As we watched TV (a very big Samsung widescreen LCD), just wearing identical bathrobes, I felt something I haven't quite felt for sometime now, contentment.