The Journey is half the fun?

Our journey from Port Douglas to Bangkok was quite eventful, because, first of all we almost didn’t get out of Australia.

For some unknown reason, I decided that it would be alright to book the 6:00 a.m. flight leaving Cairns going to Brisbane. Since Cairns is a one hour drive from Port Douglas, and with check-in and security screening and all, our pickup time from PD was 3:15 a.m. So, of course, that meant that our getup time was sometime before that, about 2:00 a.m. Some may say, why bother going to bed at all? But we are too old for that. We did turn the lights off about 9:30 the night before to try to sleep. Jack may have slept a little bit, but I probably only slept a few hours, an hour at a time, because I was worried that we would oversleep the alarm and miss the plane. Anyway, I never sleep well before anything major, especially before going to a new country. Fortunately, we did not miss our transport, nor miss the plane. And I did get a little bit of sleep on that 6:00 a.m. flight.

The journey out of Brisbane into Thailand, however, is another story. We discovered, when making our connection, that in order to meet Thai immigration requirements, we must have some sort of transportation arrangements in place to leave Thailand before we could go in. So, with very little time to spare, we went to the internet kiosk to book ourselves a flight to Kulua Lampour the day before our 30 day Thailand visa expires. Booking the flight proved to be very stressful. It seems that at the same time we were trying to use our Visa bank card to buy the airline ticket in Brisbane, the hotel that we had just checked out of in Port Douglas was trying to charge our final bill to the same card. Our bank has an entire department that looks for unusual card use, and determined that we could not be in two places at once, and turned off our card before the ticket purchase went through. After a little panic attack that we would miss the flight, I finally found the direct website for Air Asia, who takes American Express, and booked and paid for the flight directly with them instead of using the travel site that only took Visa.

So, with immigrations requirements met, we still had to make it through security and customs, both of which needed to open some more lanes because of the extremely long lines. We saw on the overhead monitors that our plane was in Final Boarding status, and just started asking folks if we could cut in front of them so we would not miss our flight. When we made it through both lines, we started running to the gate.

We were not the last passengers on the plane, but our names had been paged more than once with the final boarding call. A nice young man with a walkie-talkie saw us, a fat lady and an old man running down the corridor carrying all of their stuff, and called ahead to the gate saying that we were on our way. Needless to say, I was pretty stressed out when we made it to our seats.

Thank goodness the flight itself was uneventful. They kept bringing us food and water, supplied a clean blanket, new sleep mask, ear plugs, and headphones. And the seats in front of us had a TV monitor that played a wide array of movies and shows. And, no crying babies. All in all, it was very pleasant, as far as an eight-hour flight can be. I did worry from time to time, however, that I had not properly logged off of the computer in the airport, and that someone, everyone maybe, was logging their time onto my credit card. I didn’t need to worry, however, because the bank had just turned off my credit card and I was only charged $3. Can I hear a “Thank you Jesus!”

I did work it out with the bank and hotel to turn my card back on and to pay my final bill. And, Jack and I learned an important lesson here, to check and double check immigration requirements to where you are going to make sure you meet them.