This Girls' Trip Is Done! 🧡

This is a girls' trip. Yet I'm reluctant to fully term it as such because of the stereotypical assumptions of what girls do when we do 'girls' trips'. Even I am guilty of holding that stereotype. I most certainly am not into spas, shopping or beauty things. No yoga things either. Neither am I into parties, getting drunk and eating at Michelin-starred restaurants or whatever 'best of' places. It has to be a balance of somewhere in between. Preferably evened out with a gym and a pilates session. But I guess it's how we define it that matters. Many friends do live-on-board dive trips as a 'girls' trip'. We do medical mission trips in rural regions. In our mid-forties, who cares about labels that define us?! We will define it ourselves. 

M, S and I are very different individuals. Yet we share a friendship spanning 20 years. For M and S, theirs started during college days in the UK. Being ex-colleagues accelerated our friendship. They're more open to being friends with colleagues. I'm not, and never will be. But our type of fast-paced work which included a ton of traveling meant that we were exposed to one another's quirks super early on. None of us have a choice in there. Hahaha. 'Staffing our bosses' on work trips and putting out sudden fires meant that we were extremely professional about it and learnt to appreciate one another's strengths, cover the other's weaknesses and carry everyone through a trip smoothly. We learnt to lean on one another.

Traveling for vacations meant that we only need to be responsible for ourselves. We haven't done this travel together as a trio for years! Actually, I hadn't even seen them since early February. LOLOLOL It says a lot about friendship, trust and efficiency when we randomly cobbled together a trip within three days, and MADE IT without any drama. What we did in Hong Kong reminded us of how much we love to just chill out and have fun with one another. Our brand of humor complement each other's quirks, and it has been so so awesome. We love it! We can share a room and a bathroom. BUT. We do need to sleep in THREE SEPARATE BEDS! 😂 

We're already thinking of another trip, and another, and a bigger one before we hit 50 years old. S is absolutely meticulous about details. It isn't so much of a surprise that she thoughtfully got something drawn as a gift for us, but it's heartwarming that she bothered to. It's such a wonderful gesture to remember this trip. Ralph Lazar of The Last Lemon at The Happy Page illustrated this. These little details. Awwwww.

Alrighty. Till the next one, my lovelies.