I have this calendar with the special days of the year marked as red-letter days. Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, however, were marked off as April 20 and 21 (they’re really supposed to be on the 13th and 14th of April). I think my Uncle Rene had the same misprinted calendar because he was the instigator of the whole Boracay trip. “We’ll arrive there on Monday, April 17, and leave by Thursday when the Holy Week crowd starts coming in,” he told my Aunt Gel after he’d shelled out for expensive PAL tickets. “Holy Week? But Holy Week falls on the previous week!” my Aunt Gel informed him. Too late: earlier flights had been booked up, so we had to stick to the strange schedule.

To save money, my mom and Aunt Gel plotted a way around the inflated PAL ticket prices. We’d take a morning flight out of Manila to Iloilo, where we would rent a private shuttle that would drive us to Caticlan. From there, we’d take a jetty to Boracay Island.

I didn’t think the five-and-a-half hour drive would have us going out of our minds and trying to scratch our way out through the windows of the Nissan Urvan, but we started out late at 12 noon from Iloilo. I pronounced a gloomy outcome by the third hour: “We’ll get to Boracay with the sun setting.” We wanted to catch a few rays and start on our tans, but the sea had already swallowed up the sun by the time we got into our swimsuits and out of our cottage on Station 1.

Then again, they say the fun starts when the sun goes down.

To be continued…

Tags: Boracay, Summer vacation