A series of stupid ideas

It's that moment when you're knee-deep in water, missing a shoe, with two terrified soaked dog-paddling animals next to you in the dark, and are about a 1/4 mile from shore that you realize something has gone awry.

Not death-threateningly awry, just, that perhaps things had not gone according to plan, if you had a plan, which you clearly didn't.

And by you, I mean me, because really, no one else does these kinds of stupid things. Except Heidi, but we are genetically predisposed in that way.

So yes, I decided in the middle of the night to take my dogs to a secluded beach, populated at that time only by a few straggling divers making their way inland with flashlights and air tanks strapped to their backs.

This, however, was not the extent of my bad ideas.

The tide was exceptionally low, and not having a long beach on which to walk my dogs, I thought it would be an opportune moment to explore what was on the other side of this really big cliffline that I assumed was only like, a few feet long.

Because clearly my sense of geography is entirely warped, as I have gazed at this particular cliff line from afar, and apparently not noticed that it is large enough to support an entire hotel, and also hundreds of feet from the closest shore.

Yah!

And, as you can imagine, as I waded by dogs around the side of the cliff, expecting at some point to find beach, I was disappointed only to find more and more cliff, and water of varying depths, but which seemed to generally get deeper as we continued.

Also there was coral, which hurt and ate my shoe.

Like many a doomed explorer before me, however, I decided we had to go on.

So on we trudged, Rusty in my arms, Paz desperately swimming beside me, too far away from the previous shore and hundreds and hundreds (really it was a long way) of feet to the sandy beach.

I mean, the trip wasn't going to kill us. But it was dark, and I did lose my shoe.

Many minutes later, upon arrival at the beach everything was great.

Rusty immediately peed on something; Paz rolled around.

Except for the fact that I was soaked and my car was on the other side of the cliffline, and only accessible by either a trek back through the water, or a trek through an unlit gravel road cutting through menacing (even in the daytime) jungle -- and also an eco-adventure park -- things were looking up.

I decided to walk around on the beach for a while, because certainly, at some point, someone will return my phone calls and drive me back to my car without the possibility of meeting taotaomo'na, or like, other fun jungle-dwelling creature on the dark road.

Flash forward like an hour later, after exhausting all attempts to be rescued via cellphone, and walking up and down the beach a few times, I meandered begrudgingly in the general direction of my car, which was at the end of the Tumon strip, past the last brightly lit hotel, down a dark road that turned into an even darker gravel road leading to a concrete lot where my car was parked.

I only made it so far as the last hotel, however, before it started raining, and also simultaneously my phone died.

This is the point at which you're like, wow, either I'm going to sit under an awning of the Nikko hotel chapel all night, or I'm going to ask that nice-looking Japanese security guard who probably won't rape me to give me a ride back to my car.