Questa è Enida

We had enough of our house-arrest lifestyle for 3 days. All of us! So today, my vote for driving 300km southbound went unchallenged. Me Monchies’ face just lit up, oh brighter than the mid-morning sun! And even after completing the 300++km challenge and even when the Tuesday’s sun was  no longer hanging on the Danga Bay’s horizon… Kitreena and Edrick  were still spinning around jumping up and down like the Ever Ready Heavy Duty batteries that they are. I must have conserved enough energy those 3 days – these kids look like they will not need to be plugged in for another month! Hoy!

Driving 300km south of Kuala Lumpur seemed to be the best idea today because:

• My brother, Deal, just received his pink bundle of joy!
• I have not seen, touched, held, cuddled, smother a newborn ever since Edrick!
• The last time I was in Johor Bharu was at Deal’s wedding over 3 years ago.
• Kitreena only had an ‘ON’ button for the manual reminder/request: “Mom, I wanna see the baby. Mom, I wanna see the baby. Mom, I wanna see the baby. Mom, I wanna see the baby.” No, no ‘OFF’ button.
• I like driving south – all my body parts are going in the same direction anyway.

So when the sun woke my son up, and my son woke me up… I assigned myself a Jalan-Jalan Cari Pasal mission. Johor Bharu, here we come!

I wanted it to be an easy-going day. An easy-going day it was, an easy-going day indeed. Well, at least in the beginning.  Armed and equipped with all the munchies & nibblies, we took a leisure shopping and lunch stop at KLCC. Shopped at MotherCare, had lunch at Dome, reloaded Touch-n-Go at Maybank, bought kuehs at La Cucur, plus 3 washroom visits in between. Yes, three! (Boy, these kids were leaking!) By the time we hit the SMART Tunnel, it was quarter to 1600hrs!

With the half tank on my rented City, I knew I could go quite far. So I passed on filling up in KL to beat the rush hour – which was against my long-distant driving policy. But I hushed myself with two words: easy going. It was only 300km.  The first quick stop was right in front of my mak angkat Chan Yoke Lin’s fruit stall Hentian Serdang – to set my GPS pointing me to Mount Austin. The second stop: Nilai Utara – to shift Edrick to the front seat so Kitreena can lay down in the back seat. Total stop time: 6 minutes 22 seconds accumulative. I could feel my easy-going mission ‘going south’ very easily.

I was, nonetheless, making a good time  doing my Autobahn-style speed whenever the GPS went quiet and doing 119km per hour on the stretches that are ‘Police Ambush Area’ and ‘Speed Trap Zone’.  And that was despite Edrick’s frantic attempt to scare me with what he misheard as ‘This Dragon Zone’!  He kept on repeating the GPS’s instructions as though I was going left on all the right turns. Arrghh! I was busy driving and he was busy driving me nuts, bolts and screws!

Our little City on four wheels eventually became quiet when me Monchies dozed off, which gave me some quiet time to reflect on my life. Chewah! Well, I was truly reflecting on my life until…