SUMMARY Il dolce far niente is an Italian phrase that literally means “the sweetness of doing nothing.” Scott and I have bastardized it to be Farns Niente to mean the Sweetness of the Farnsworths doing nothing. Today we truly exemplified that by doing little more than being lazy and switching from our downtown hotel to one at the airport. — Karen
DETAIL
Today promises to be a do-nothing, boring day. We’re on our own all day, for the most part. Our driver of the last two days, Tawee, is scheduled to pick us up at 1:30 pm to transfer us to a different hotel, closer to the airport. Our flight tomorrow, from Bangkok to Bali, leaves at 6 am, which means we need to be up before 4 am. One good thing is that we get to sleep in today.
We’ve already planned that we’ll have only two meals today: a late breakfast at our current hotel and an early dinner at our new hotel. Since we’ll be getting up early we want to go to bed early (and thus want an early dinner).
After breakfast we hang out in the room for a while, doing our final packing, and eventually check out and turning our luggage over to the bellman for safekeeping. The elevator takes us to the top floor, which is all outside. There’s a bar, a pool, a pond, and many nice sitting areas. The sky is bluer than it’s been for most of our trip. It’s warm, but not bad, and there’s a nice breeze. To help out the economy I get a beer.
Tawee is there right at 13:30, as agreed. The traffic to the airport isn’t bad but it takes quite a while. In our new hotel’s parking lot we see the pedestrian sky bridge that goes over the freeway to the airport. We drop our stuff and make a timed practice walk to the airport, simulating what we’ll be doing at 4 am tomorrow. It takes 7 minutes. After some confusion we figure out where we’ll be checking in and we find the Air Asia ticket counter.
We already have our tickets, and we’ve even checked in, but there are only two of us and we have four seats. Somehow we bought too many tickets. The nice lady at the counter figures out how to generate a refund for us without cancelling our ‘good’ tickets. There’s a large, older gentleman next to her, helping her out. He would not look out of place in a 1930’s gangster movie set in Hong Kong.
We check out the pool back at our hotel, but it’s not enough to get us out of our clothes. The time is better spent trying to solve the ‘out of space’ problem for blog images. Jose or Diego or someone, likely from Mexico, calls me back to help. Apparently they just changed their offering names and prices, and this most likely hasn’t yet propagated to this part of the world. I adjust the VPN on my laptop so that it appears that I’m in Los Angeles and soon all is well.
For dinner we split west and east, with a cheeseburger and fries for me and Cashew Chicken and rice for Karen (sadly sans cashews). By 7:30 we’re in bed and I’m asleep before long, courtesy of a sleeping pill, visions of alarm clocks dancing in my head.
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