Good Afternoon Phuket!

So we landed in Phuket on a pretty small prop engine plane, all bruised and battered from the morning's excitement. We secured a cab to our hotel in Kata Beach called the Kata Sea Breeze resort. The airport is on the NW side of the island while the hotel is on the southern part. It took over an hour to get here from the airport and cost about 750 Thai Baht, or $25. (Exchange rate is $1=30 Baht) The drive took us past a Tsunami Memorial, through towns with old & new construction, and past the road that goes up to The Big Buddha. The Buddha sits up on top of a giant hill (really more like a small mountain) overlooking the sea. It is quite lovely! We enquired today about how much it would cost to hire a cab to go up there- 1000 Baht. I'm not sure we'll spring for it since we'll still have time in Chiang Mai with other temples and Buddhas to see.
Scarlett slept in the cab, we got to our hotel and immediately headed out to check out the beach. We plan to spend a significant amount of time there tomorrow, but we just wanted to lay our eyes on the Andaman Sea. It was about a 10 (very hot) minute walk down the street to the beach access. The beach is long and beautiful with powdery fine sand and was quite busy. We hung out for just a few minutes, then went back to the hotel & immediately to the pool, which was complete with a swim up bar. Yes! We ordered apple juices for the girls (Scarlett said, "Apple juice pleeaasse mommy?" How can you say no to that?) a Chang beer for broken down Joe and a pina colada for me. It was late afternoon, so the weather was perfect and sunny, but not too hot as the shade was moving across the pool. We spent the remainder of the afternoon in the pool then went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. Afterwards, Audrey wanted to go back to the pool, so Joe took Scarlett up to our room for bed while I went to the pool with Audrey.
There were 2 other little girls in the pool whom Audrey started to play with. One was a 7 year old Thai girl named Beam who speaks no English and who's mom worked in the hotel. Then other was a 9 year old Scottish Thai girl named Alanya who lives in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia and was visiting on holiday. She speaks a few words of Thai with a Scottish accent and was able to teach us some. The three of them played until the pool closed at 8:00, then it was upstairs to bed. Joe worked some tonight with a 24 hour wifi pass. Unfortunately, no free wifi here either!! (This is totally different than China, where we were able to hop onto free wifi pretty much everywhere we went without any problem.)