Travel day – and we already know its going to be a long one. We are flying through Kuala Lumpur, leaving Bangkok on a late afternoon flight. However, our overnight flight to Adelaide, originally scheduled to depart at 6pm and arrive Friday morning at 9am, has been “delayed” and will now leave at 9pm. Sigh. Malaysia Airlines no less. Double Sigh. So, while we are up at our usual early time we have a very long day ahead of us.

After breakfast and our last pictures of the lovely hotel atrium garden and view from the elevator sitting area…

… we hit the room for final organization. But wait! What’s this? We get a notification that our afternoon flight to Kuala Lumpur has been canceled. And we’ve not been rebooked? What? But we’re still booked on the Adelaide flight. Sure, we’ll just swim! For God’s sakes! What next ensued was 90 minutes of full on crisis mode! Searching for new flights, we see there is a 2pm flight to Kuala Lumpur that will allow us time for our connection to Adelaide (ok, a lot of time, but rather be there than not). The only problem is we are over an hour away from the Bangkok airport and our booked transfer isn’t arriving until noon. Crap.

All hands on deck. We get on the phone with Malaysia Air, which you think would be easy, but no, nothing is easy! The rep on the phone can’t understand what we want – um – to fly to Kuala Lumpur to make our flight? He keeps putting us on hold. Ed and I take turns on the phone and in the shower. After he tries to re-route us all around the globe to get us to Adelaide a day later, we finally tell him to stop it and just book us on the 2pm flight. In the meantime, I’m trying to get a hold of the pre-booked transfer, but keep getting an automated response from texts and the phone number to call doesn’t answer, it just hangs up.

It is now a little before 11am and we have got to get our butts going to Bangkok. I take one bag downstairs and check out. Ed stays on the phone with the Malaysian Air rep. I’m still texting the pre-booked transfer, with no results. Ed texts to tell me he’s almost done and to just order a Grab taxi. Which I do. And as they have accepted and are on their way, the stupid pre-booked transfer place finally texts back saying they are on the way. To which I say just cancel because it is too late and you were too hard to get contact. Jeez. What a fun morning!

The Grab guy arrives in a beat up old jalopy. He’s really sweet though and we sort of half chat in his broken English as he changes out of his flip flops and into better driving shoes! Ed finally comes down – after the call was disconnected without us really knowing if we’ve ben re-booked. Oh well, we’re going to the airport and we’ll figure it out then.

Bags stowed (including in the front seat because there isn’t enough room in the trunk) and we are off. Boy, are we off! Our driver knows the meaning of hurry! He drives like a Bat out of Hell – changing lanes, zooming around slower vehicles – oh, and all the time? He’s watching some TV program on his phone. Kid you not! I’m just closing my eyes and praying to Buddha that we’ll get there in one piece. And, to his credit, we do – in less than an hour. Oh, this guy is good! He gets a big tip, that’s for sure.

Now at the airport all is actually taken care of easily. The girl at the check in counter gets us on the 2pm flight without a problem. We drop the bags and head through security, and are at the Gate with plenty of time to spare. Phew. Off we go!

Once at Kuala Lumpur, we find the Priority club and begin our long, long wait. We are there so long, we actually run out of time on one club card and have to re-check-in with the other card! But, its a good place to sit until our flight is called. Unfortunately we didn’t do enough research about the airport, because there was a rainforest in the middle of the concourse we could have walked around during our time there. We didn’t figure that out until after the rainforest closed at 7pm. Pooh.

We managed to get through our 6 hour layover, finally boarding our plane and taking off over the beautifully lit city of Kuala Lumpur on our way to our AAC reunion in Adelaide.