September 24, 2025
Another early start for another excursion day. We were picked up at 7:30am and Ollie and I settled in for more Harry Potter through shared ear buds for the 90 minute drive. The first stop was the Barong Dance Show but were a bit early so walked about the village with our guide, Guna, showing us the cemetery and sharing about the different, elaborate, end of life ceremonies in Bali.
We were grateful to have a program that described what was happening in the dance performance to help answer the boys non-stop questions. Ollie was super into the show and eager to understand all of the scenes while Len switched from laying down and semi-paying attention. Both of the boys favorite part was when a monkey’s tail was sticking out from between his legs and looked like a huge penis.
After the dance performance, we drove on to the Bali bird park. We were surprised to be given birds of paradise to hold at the entrance– the kids loved this. There were no bird incidents except one where the bird I was holding tried to eat part of my hat and one of the buttons popped off.
We arrived to the park just in time for the Birds of Prey show. Len surprisingly raised his hand to volunteer for the hawk portion and was selected from the audience to join the host. I wasn’t sure he would go through with it but after demanding that I hold his hand as he walked down the steps, he let go and ran off to join the host. He held a tray above his head while the host put bird food on top to lure the hawks to dive down and grab their treat off the tray. After being reluctant to raise his own hand, Ollie sulked around for a bit at missing his chance to feed a hawk.
We walked through the rest of the bird park with the last area having a few Komodo dragons— a nice preview for our next stop on the trip, Komodo Island.
By this point in the day we were all starving so asked our guide to stop for lunch before we drove home. The kids had another mediocre pizza, I had gado gado and Kyle more chicken satay. We were surprised to see wooden Indian runner ducks as decor by the restaurant pool!
It was a brutal drive back to the hotel, it should have taken 1 hour but took close to 3. The diver told us there was a wedding in the village which fully closed the streets around our hotel. He said this happens often and usually without any warning.
Back at the hotel, we had a bit of quiet time for everyone before our early bird dinner reservation. Another hotel down the street from ours, Asri, that doesn’t allow children at the restaurant past 7pm, so we made a 5:30pm reservation. Kyle was not feeling well by dinner which had us wondering if his chicken satay from lunch wasn’t sitting well with him. Before the kids and I ate, we practiced some sight words on my phone app and Ollie had a near perfect score on his 2nd grade words. Lenny goes, “How is he so GOOD at this!!” We assured Len that Ollie was not this good at words at age 4 or 5 either.
Another early bedtime but thankfully no drives planned for tomorrow! While putting the kids to bed, Lenny picked “From Now On” from the Greatest Show, Ollie chose “The Drum” by The Siege and I chose “Other Side of Paradise” by the Revivalists. The kids asked what paradise was and I told them I think the song is about heaven but heaven is whatever you believe it to be. Len said his paradise is a day of iPad time and Ollie said his is where he is a quarterback and there are no poor people.
