Day.....one? Day how many?

Travel day was tough for this trip: Newark to Hong Kong to Bangkok [tight connection here] to Sukhothai. We also used a new place to park at Newark, and didn't have any idea what to expect, how far we'd need to walk, how regularly the shuttle would run from the lot to the terminal (it could not have worked out better!). We left EWR at 1am Saturday morning and finally arrived at our hotel in Sukhothai 27-ish hours later, but 12 hours ahead of that because of the time zone difference.

We always reserve a window and aisle seat at the back of the plane in the hope of having the middle seat empty, to give us a little more room, and it's actually surprising how often we get it. Not this time, though. Usually we take the middle seat so we can still sit together, but this trip we decided Marc would keep the aisle seat and I'd take the window, in large part because that kept him free to get up and roam around as often as he wanted. The guy between us was OK enough, a young guy who lives in Hong Kong. I mostly slept the whole trip, in that weird neck-killing, body-hurting way of being asleep but kinda not asleep but also asleep and then awake because my god the neck, I have to use both hands to move my head. Poor Marc didn't sleep at all, maybe 15 minutes all together and not all at one go.

Hong Kong at dawn, as usual

But the Hong Kong change was easy, and the Bangkok change was even easy -- customs and immigration, luggage retrieved and money changed, and final flight made. We landed in Sukhothai at a Bangkok Airways airport like the one in Trat; you are ferried from the plane in a golf cart, "baggage claim" is a guy in a pith helmet and safari clothes standing at an open area and then handing you your luggage, but in Sukhothai there was also a whole bunch of live zebras and a giraffe for some bizarre unknown reason. Also: gigantic statues of dinosaurs.

The cab ride to the hotel was easy and while we were completely mind-whacked from the jet lag and very long flights and physical exhaustion, we changed into our bathing suits and headed for the pool. Although we planned to walk to the restaurant Marc had found for us, we ended up taking a tuk-tuk, eating a magnificent meal (more on that in the next post), and then sleeping for almost 11 hours straight, without waking up even once.

All in all, except for the perfectly fine guy sitting between us on the long flight, it could not have gone better.