My Malta Ambition

I'm not a very ambitious person, especially recently with having to take care of two kids all alone, because husband left me for a couple of days. Almost the only thing I'm cabable of doing is trying to entertain an adorable, sometimes very demanding or even slightly annoying, two year old. Cedric is as easy going as you can wish for, Ned, uhm, well... isn't :o) You might smile at me, but my only "ambition" for our time here in Malta was taking a good picture of one of the famous yellow Malta buses. And as we will be sailing on tomorrow, today was THE day to do it. If you ever tried taking photographs with a toddler in tow you might understand why I call it "ambitious", if you never had that pleasure you might just only think me silly, but I digress (nice word, I only learned it a couple of days ago:o) ).

Plan A was to get the kids ready, go to breakfast and then head to the bus station straight away. When I was woken up by my very cute alarm clock slightly earlier than the last couple of days(at 7:40am, due to a nasty cold and a blocked nose, poor fellow), I opened my curtains and immediately cancelled plan A. It was raining cats and dogs. Unfortunately I didn't really know what plan B could be, so I thought: "wait and see!!" Just before 11am it stopped, so I thought I'd grab the chance, stuffed the (not so) little one in the sling, put my camera in its bag, collected the stroller, finally made it down the gangway (almost falling off it at the end, oops), sitting Ned in his "Porsche" and off we went.

There is a neat little "short cut" from the the ship to down town Valetta: You go through a little tunnel, then you end up on a big car park, from there you take the lift up to street level, and there you are, almost as good as in down town Valetta. Well, entering the tunnel on one side the ground was slightly wet but it wasn't raining and looked rather friendly. Exiting on the other side though, it was pouring down again. Great!!! My umbrella was in our cabin, a very useful place for a umbrella to be in if you're outside and it's pouring down. Luckily I met two girls from the ship and they lent me theirs or else I would have aborted my mission and gone back to the ship lamenting over my ambitious failure of taking a photo of a Maltese bus. Now pushing a stroller, carrying a baby in a sling and holding a umbrella in the pouring rain, that's what I call multi-tasking, and when reaching the bus station level it ceased raining, I gave it a go and added another thing to my multi-tasking: taking a photo of a yellow bus of course! Once I walked over to the bus stops and had my camera out though, it REALLY started to rain, and I don't mean a nice little drizzle, I mean RAIN, bucket loads of rain, pouring down on us!! I managed to take three of four pictures before I was too afraid that my camera would drown. I don't have a rain cover for Ned's stroller only a little sun roof, which held the water off slightly, but he got so soak that he stated the obvious: "Mama, wet, cold". So, now it was really time to call it a day, and as I was pretty wet already I just marched back to the lift through the rivers of rain water on the road, BUT my ambitious Malta Mission had been successful: I DID take a photo, no, not even only one, but Four photos of a Maltese bus :o)