July 9th - 11th: Travel, Travail, Triumph

It is probably a little ostentatious, or maybe melodramatic to describe this as such, but it certainly felt like A Whole Thing. Spoiler alert for the story: Chrissy packs defensively, from hard experience, and it is a pretty good thing that she does.

What is defensive packing, you might ask? Maybe you don’t, but again, my blog, my words. So you asked it. Or might. Much like defensive driving or defensive coding, defensive packing is just packing for the worst. What happens if our bags are delayed getting out of San Francisco, don’t make the connection through Singapore, and we just end up in Bali with only our carryons? Well: we’d better have at least two changes of clothes and enough toiletries to make do. And do we did make.

The first exciting thing that happened was a ten-hour unexpected layover in Singapore. Our flight was delayed a little out of SFO (and we didn’t know at the time, but our bags didn’t even make it on our flight; they were on the next flight out of SFO), so we missed our connection. The airline rebooked us for 10 hours later, and put us in a hotel for 8 hours. It was a little surreal, to be honest. Probably a side effect of flying business class, they take good care of you. The hotel, a taxi to and from, and two meals paid for.

Traveling is quite a lot better when you’ve got support. I texted our travel agent, who made sure that our guide and pickup knew we’d be arriving in Bali ten hours late, and they made arrangements to adjust the trip itinerary. The little taste of Singapore made me pretty excited for the back part of the trip, when we’ve got a planned stay here.

The hotel’s main restaurant was kind of buffet style, with all varieties of food. Do you want sambal and dosa for breakfast? Dim sum? Fried noodles? Eggs and beans? Why do you want eggs and beans for breakfast, you traveled all the way here. Whatever. I didn’t eat the eggs and beans; I had fried noodles, sambal, dosa, and a pretty great fishball soup. We went back for lunch. In my experience, hotel restaurant food is usually pretty good, but not amazing relative to the food you can find if you really look around nearby, so I’m pretty dingdang excited about that return trip. 

Okay, as to the rest, despite saying that our bags would meet us in Bali, the airline kind of forgot them again. They ended up on the next flight from Singapore to Bali (our bags seem to be the Snorlax of luggage), but they actually did show up and were delivered Saturday while we were out and about. More on that in the next post.

Shout outs to: the 24h helpdesk support from both Audley Travel (our travel agent) and Destination Asia (the local tour operators for this leg of the trip). Everyone has been great and supportive.

Negative shout out to: time zones. We basically lost a day- we took off Wednesday night, flew for 15 hours, and landed on Friday. This means Chrissy broke her wordle streak, because Thursday just disappeared.

Sorry I didn’t have that many photos in this post, the next one will have a lot more. Saturday (which is today as I write this, since I had to wait for the luggage to catch up with my keyboard to start really typing) has been pretty great so far.