AMAZING, AMAZING, AMAZING!

If you have been checking for pictures, I apologize for the long wait. I tried to post last week but had so many problems that I had to delete the whole thing and start over. Hopefully it will go better today.

I will start by just giving a little tour of our villa. It was AMAZING! I cannot say that enough times or strongly enough. Just absolutely out-of-this-world perfect-for-our-taste AMAZING.

Here, the entrance to our villa:

The AMAZINGLY cool wooden doors open into a private little courtyard. I will show detailed pictures of this area in another post.

As you turn from the doors this is the view that greets you:

AMAZING!!!

This is what the ceilings look like:

There were 3 of those ceilings just in our villa: one over the bedroom, one over the bathroom and one over the living/dining area. They look to be all handmade. Eric said he couldn't find a nail or screw anywhere. The craftsmanship is AMAZING.

This is the bed as it is during the daytime:

And this is the bed at night:

Housekeeping comes in each evening to turn down the bed. They also spread the lovely and probably useful mosquito netting around the bed, light some incense to keep the bugs away and turn on lights.

There is a dressing room between the bedroom and bathroom. Do you see the beautiful wood slat doors? On one side of the dressing room is a chest and windows looking into another private courtyard. The other side is closets. Beyond is the start of the bathroom, which is, yes, AMAZING.

You have to look in the above picture to see the bathtub because I didn't take a picture of it. It was beautiful. Next to the tub was a marble top table will all of these wonderful amenities:

There were bath salts, bath gel, some other oil which I mistook for bubble bath (it didn't bubble), a candle and incense. I've never liked incense before but after my experience in Bali I bought a bunch of it to bring home. It now seems blissful, peaceful, AMAZING to me. (Eric says it makes him think of pot-smokers. I told him he would just have to get over that because I don't have that association and I am going to burn incense and dream of Bali! He is okay with that.)

Nothing was presented in a "tacky" plastic bottle. Everything was in ceramic jars, properly labeled.

And although I did not take a picture of the whole bathtub, I did take a close-up of one of the pillows in the tub. There were two. What a wonderful idea! So very relaxing. Each pillow was adorned with a fresh Frangiapani flower. The flowers are everywhere in Bali and they have the most AMAZING scent. Very strong and very beautiful.

If you didn't want to take a bath you could take a shower in this beautiful, modern, clean shower with one of those huge rainwater shower heads.

Lovely as that shower was, we never used it. Instead we used this AMAZING OUTDOOR shower. The memory of this makes me melt. I want to go back to Bali just for this shower. I never would have dreamed I would love it; in fact, I never would have dreamed I would even have TOLERATED an outdoor shower. But this was the most peaceful thing I have ever experienced. Words cannot convey how beautiful the setting was, how wonderful the sound of water pouring out of the bamboo faucet. I hope heaven has showers like this. It must, because this was just absolutely heavenly.

When I left the shower, it was to lounge on the daybed in the living room (pictures in another post) looking through the dining room at this view:

Each day we had a new selection of fresh fruit left on our dining room table.

This isn't the clearest picture, but I love it. See that picture on the wall? It is actually a mirror reflecting flowers on the wall of the bedroom portion of the villa. Another amazing memory for me.

Chaises on our patio. We napped here one day.

Beautiful doors from our bedroom onto the patio. Inside the glass doors you can see a separate set of wood slat doors. They are covered on the outside with screen so that, at night, you could close just the wooden doors, keep the bugs at bay and listen to the surf at night. I'm melting again with the memory.

And finally, because I love little details, a close-up of the door hardware. I loved this place so much that even the door hardware seemed amazingly beautiful to me.I have more pictures - a few of things beyond the villa - that I hope to share soon.

I want to live in Bali. In this villa. Forever. It was simply AMAZING.