A night to remember

Our stay in Lagos was getting to the end. As a last memory we wanted to spend a night at the beach hoouse. We went together with the Zimburg family, Axi 7, Uli 9 and their parents Marieke and Albrecht. We had a lovely walk along the beach, the kids playing in the pool and the two fathers preparing the moskito nets for the night. The holes in the roofing where noticed and they hung the nets as best they could to avoid the worst places.

The dinner went well, barbeque and happy kids. It started to get dark so we were lighting some candles. The wind started to increase in strength so we engineered a candle holder from an empty waterbottle. The kids lit some candle in and kept under the bar to protect them from the wind.

And then came the rain. We all knew it was rainy season, but we also knew that we could be lucky and get little or no rain. We got the lot. Rain, wind, thunder and lightning. And the rain was pouring down fast and hard. We just had to try and save what could be saved. So we grabbed the bags and threw them under the bar desk to keep the bedding dry, save the cameras etc. I noticed young axi talkking about some candles, but did not pay any attention because we needed to get the stuff out of the pouring rain. Suddenly it was the smell of something burning. Fire under the bar desk. We had put some luggage over a burning candle!

The loss turned out to be three beloved pillows. The place was suddenly covered in tiny wet feathers and meltet nylon from the bags. After this shocking experience and calming down the kids, we went to find them a dry place to sleep. That was surely easier said than done.

They ended up in the storage room on top of some mattresses. Two of them with their stuffed animals. The adults had to look really hard to find somewhere dry to spend the night.
We ended up three of us sleeping on two mattresses in the shower, and one on a mattress on the toalett.

B ut we never lost our good sense of humour, we survived the night, and in the morning everything was sunny and nice again. And Olav was covered with 50 insect bites while the rest of us were spared. And all three of the kids had experienced their worst night ever.