You know how you always hope that one day you'll get bumped up to first class on the plane travelling somewhere far, far away so that you can spend at least 10 hours cocooned in comfort and privilege, swigging champagne and eat small canapés with smoked salmon on them?

Or being upgraded to the presidential suite in some posh hotel because they've accidentally overbooked and that is the ONLY room available and you are the lucky, lucky people to be selected to have the sweeping panoramic views and Jacuzzi bathtubs? And it always happens to other people?

Well, guess what, this time we were those lucky 'other people'! This time it really did happen to us - we booked a hotel room and ended up living in a 3 bedroom beachfront villa, our own rockstar pad, with our own swimming pool. It took us two days to get over the shock of our surroundings and stop walking around stroking the soft furnishings and marvelling at the light fittings. Honestly, you'd think we'd spent the last 3 weeks living up a tree!

We are on a little island, 10 minutes from Phuket, with the idyllic name of Coconut Island, and yes there are coconut palms alongside banana trees and all sorts of flora and fauna, including a chorus of croaking frogs who venture out at nightfall and serenade us on the way to dinner. I don't think Frog Island would have sounded quite so romantic though.

The reason we were upgraded, as we discovered when we did a bit of a walkabout, was that the resort is still under construction. Luckily for us the vast building site is over the hill and out of sound and sight, but our villa is just perfect, and, haha, loads posher than our home - if only we could live here! We are right on the (tiny) beach, looking straight over the water to some far off islands. In front of us we have our perfectly formed swimming pool and sunbeds - no need to reserve them with our towels first thing in the morning; they're ours, all ours. The master bedroom suite is huge, with a massive bathroom and a balcony big enough for a couple of comfy chairs and a small table perfect for holding the mandatory sundowner beer. The house is bristling with flat screen televisions and dvd players, we can barely believe our luck. Brian was thrilled to discover we had not one but two flat screen televisions, surely one of them had to be covering some football? Somewhere. Can you believe luxury villas can have only 5 tv channels? Strangely enough they can. Tch. What is the world coming to? Someone should complain.

Even though the weather hasn't been that great this week; quite a few thunderstorms and a bit overcast in the afternoons, it has still been warm and pleasant and if we can't sit by our pool, we can loll around on the massive sofa reading our books or watching the tennis. Hey, it's not such a bad life!

There's always a fly in the ointment though, isn't there? And this week we had to confront the thorny issue of our visa situation which, yet again, I have 'slightly' miscalculated. ahem. My weeks of careful and meticulous planning for this trip, plotting routes, mapping the beach desirability coordinates and working out a complicated logarithm for hotel star rating ability combined with tripadvisor reviews divided by the cheapest rate payable had overlooked a simple, yet crucial fact. Did I mention? We are supposed to be in Thailand for 2 months, but we only have a 1 month visa. D'oh. Only getting round to consulting the Thai Embassy website the night before we left Brighton I realised my schoolgirl error. Instead of relying, as we usually do, on getting a visa on arrival, we should have applied to the Embassy for a 90 day visa. Oops. Only one question remained. At what point should I tell Brian?

In an attempt to remedy the situation we travelled into Phuket City for the day and called in at the Immigration Bureau to see if we could extend our visas for another 30 days. Simples - non? Ah no, apparently not. Helpfully the Thai Immigration Police employ an English Immigration Officer so we can explain our predicament without any translation issues and he can point us in the right direction. Unhelpfully it appears we cannot renew our visas 'in the country'. What does this mean? Darn it, we have to leave Thailand, even if just for a few hours, in order to get another 30 day visa. There is no way round it. Our obliging policeman informs us that even he has to do this every few weeks. What chance do we have if even he can't swipe the rubber stamp off someone's desk?!

And so, next week, we are flying out of Phuket at 1 minute to midnight on the day our visa expires, arriving in Kuala Lumpur a couple of hours later and turning straight round and catching a flight back at 6 a.m. That should be fun. Luckily the flight is quite cheap, but my reputation as Trip Organiser Extraordinaire is taking quite a hammering. Luckily the luxury villa upgrade has earned me a few brownie points, but I can't afford any more slipups or Bri will be practising his extremely smug face.

He's just asked me if we need a visa for Malaysia. Crumbs, let's hope not!