The Thailand Trip Extends

Activity level: 🌶️🌶️

Modes of transportation: 🚗👟🛫

“Time to wake up and go to Vietnam!” Sarah woke up very late to Eric packing her stuff (he wanted to give her as much sleep as possible) and she felt much better. For about 15 minutes—then it was back to the illness of the previous night.

While Sarah tried to rid her body of whatever foreign substance was causing her issues, she looked in the mirror and discovered the redness from the previous night had evolved into a full bumpy rash on her face. There was no time to panic though as the international flight from Thailand to Vietnam was in 2 hours. So Eric jammed everything he could into her bag—which was already over-full before we bought a swimsuit coverup—and we left.

(Editor’s note: We later determined Sarah’s full face rash was probably from “sea lice,” a type of small jelly fish that causes issues for lots of travelers.)

Luckily the front camera on the iPhone has some blur effect.

Thanks in part to the very nice concierge who drove us to the airport in her own car, we ended up making to the airport right before they closed check-in.

We were ecstatic to see we had just barely made checkin! Until the concierge asked for our visas.

It turned out that food poisoning was the least of our worries. We had bad info, and didn’t realize we couldn’t apply for a visa on arrival in to Vietnam (Note: Eric was in charge of looking that up). Apparently, it takes 3-10 days to get approved for a visa to get into the country. So we applied for the visa, expedited, in the airport, and bought a flight to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand since the flights were cheap. Then another to Da Nang, Vietnam for the 25th, since we would hopefully have our visas by then.

Our flight was at 1:20, so we had *4 hours* to kill and Sarah wasn’t doing her best. We tried to check in to get access to a priority pass lounge to rest in (plus nice bathrooms), but we couldn’t until 2 hours before the flight. So Sarah took a nap on a bench outside of the check in desk, and we chilled until we could get into the lounge.

Surviving, maybe not thriving.

There were some small nibbles in the lounge, but Sarah couldn’t even think of food—so Eric made her some chamomile tea, which, fortunately, she was able to drink. Eric tried some of the food, including a yellow curry with crab, and it was pretty good (and he had to eat it far away from Sarah).

Mmm lounge curry.

Finally, we made our flight where Sarah challenged Eric to a game of chess to keep her mind off turbulence. She was winning for most of the game (but ultimately lost), despite Eric playing a lot and Sarah not playing in years (a win is a win).

There was lots of napping this day.
Eric was a gentleman and carried Sarah’s bag since she was having a rough day.

The hotel we picked out turned out to be extremely boutique and cute. The staff greeted us with some refreshing papaya juice, and showed us to our room. It was exactly what we needed: a clean, cozy, relaxed room where Sarah could rest and recover.

Sarah was having trouble keeping water down at this point, but felt obligated to drink the papaya juice the staff had brought out. Luckily her stomach didn’t have any issues with it!
Having a cozy room was incredible given everything else that went wrong that day.

Eric ventured out to get some food for Sarah since she hadn’t eaten much all day. He wandered around the neighborhood looking for some bananas (surprisingly, fresh produce was hard to find—but he found some). Eventually, he got some Korean food, including avocado toast for Sarah (which she requested) and headed back to the hotel.

“My hero” – Sarah

He ate dinner, and tried to pick up the avocado toast for Sarah. The container immediately bent wrong, and all the avocado toast fell onto the floor. Sarah ended up eating the toast piece that didn’t fall on the floor, but it was sad.

The good news is that Sarah probably couldn’t have eaten the avocado on the toast anyway.

From there, we went to sleep early. Hopefully Sarah feels better in the morning!


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