My Holy Week Mis-Adventures and Adventures

Months before the Holy Week I had already fixed my family plans for the occasion. Sometime December of 2009 I received a notice from my Cathay Pacific Marco Polo Club that I have 60000 miles which was due to expire by January of 2010 which needs to be book, otherwise, the mileage will be forfeited. The equivalent was a three round trip tickets Manila-Hong Kong. I then booked the family for the trip from 31March to April 4th 2010. Then hotel accommodation was conveniently fixed by me through Internet. When the final day of departure came on 31st March 2010, I knew that travel time to the airport will be traffic so I told the family that we better allow sufficient time for our departure at 1:30pm so we left the house at 11:00am by 11:30am we were already in the airport with plenty of time to spare. Ops then the shocker in my life hit me when we were just about to enter the check-in area, the 1:30pm was not the departure time but the arrival time in Hong Kong and the real departure time was 11:05am! We missed our flight! And the mistake was totally mine. In as much as the tickets were free and are only awards for frequent mileage, it has very limited seats for each flight. I need not pay any penalty and can sill rebook the trip until end of December 2010. In the respect it was not disheartening and was a great consolation to me. However, when I called the hotel to cancel my four nights booking I was informed that I need to pay for one night or US$120 for the cancellation, there was no choice but to accept. My wife and son were so disappointed of my mistake but after a while we all had a good laugh and made fun of ourselves returning missing a flight. Upon returning home we then decided to proceed after an hour rest to Tagaytay Highlands to spend a couple of days of substitute vacation.



I did plan to take my usual morning runs in Tagaytay, but, instead did a cross training in golf as I have missed the game for quite sometime. Surprisingly, I was still able to hit good shots although on the two rounds I played had a score of 98 and 97 which was way above my usual handicap of 18. For the whole day of Thursday and Friday it was more spent sleeping and eating with the daily “visita iglesia”

When we returned to Manila on Friday night, I was already feeling bloated for eating too much and could not wait to go back to routine morning runs. On Saturday 3Apr10 at 4:30am I was already headed to Fort Bonifacio. At 4:51am I was off and running with no fixed directional plan except to make a distance of 10 km. The first km was quite difficult with stiff muscle and heavy joints and became only comfortable after 3km. Then at 5.5km my stomach started grumbling I was then at Rizal Drive and fortunate enough to have a Jolibee store within the vicinity and immediate made my pit stop. I think I really did ate a lot the last two days that had to relieve myself along my run. Then back to running with no more untoward incident. By the way, the crowd at the High Street by 6am was quite large, it was also here that I was greeted by Cris Sabal and Aileen Tolentino who were both doing the training runs. I have the following recorded running figures for the day;



Easter Sunday, I plan to do the same run at the Fort. More or less this was how my Holy Week Adventures and Mis-adventures had been.

Happy Easter to all.