I wrote this after what was quite possibly my least favorite day all year (of the year we traveled). I never posted it because I was whining. Screw it.

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Traveling around the world seems really glamorous sometimes. We eat delicious food, see incredible sights, and we make sure to post pictures showing all of these wonderful things. Here is a tale about the not so pretty side of traveling…. I got sick in South Korea a day before we were headed to Indonesia. I wished it had just been a cold where I got some annoying sniffles. Unfortunately it was a virus that acted like the cold on steroids. This could not have been worse timing. All I wanted was the be home on the couch watching Netflix. Instead I was embarking on the longest travel day yet (the time changes confuse me but it was upward of 30 hours).

The two weeks we were in South Korea I felt exhausted and under the weather…I figure this was most likely from moving way too fast in Japan and wearing ourselves out. I made sure to get extra sleep and drink plenty of water during the whole time we were in Korea. All of this came to a crashing halt the last day in Korea. I woke up feeling like a had a bad cold…my nose was running but more concerning was that my throat was hurting.  We had to check out of our Airbnb at 11:00 am and things got progressively worse from there. All I wanted to do was to stay in bed and rest. Instead, we brought our stuff over to the place my cousin was staying…it took approximately 1 hour, I could barely walk up stairs due to the amount of effort that took, and my backpack felt like it weighed one thousand pounds (on a side note — my bag is getting a big heavy weighing in at 23 lbs plus 5 lbs for my messenger bag — usually I can carry these things without any problems). We made it to drop of our bags and of course decided to go explore until we had to go to the airport that evening (smart people make stupid decisions). Several hours later it was time to make the 45 minute trip back to pick up our bags and head to the airport.

The rest of the day went something like this:

5:30 pm — Get on metro to go to my cousin’s apartment where our bags are stored. Pick up bags.

6:30 pm – Get on train to the airport. So crowded. I almost passed out. Realize we are supposed to be staying on an island upon arrival and our plane does not get in until after the last boat. PANIC!

6:35 pm — Book the first place we find online by the airport and we are proud of ourselves.

7:45 pm — Arrive at airport to check-in.

9:25 pm — Take off from Seoul (Incheon Airport) for our 5.5 hour flight. Use entire box of tissues on plane and now I have no tissues for the rest of the trip. I can barely swallow my throat hurts so bad.

1:20 am — Land in Bangkok.

1:40 am — Buy water bottle so I can take some cold medicine.

1:41 am — Surprise! Security checkpoint where they take my new, unopened bottle I just bought. I can barely stand I feel so terrible. Naturally, I cry. I then sit down in the area right before security while I dig through my bag to take my medicine with my water before they throw it away (out of principle). Security people actually are worried about me since I am irrationally upset about them taking my bottle. Not my finest moment.

2:20 am — Find a nice place to lay down for the night on some seats. It is bright, but not crowded. Contemplate stealing a roll of toilet paper to use to blow my nose.

2:30 am — Get kicked out of these seats by the janitor as we are not allowed to be there (we were told “no have here” and were forced out. I never got the full story on this.)

2:45 am — Find a nice place to lay down for the night. Steal a roll of toilet paper.

3:00 am — Airport employees wake us up and kick us out of the place we are laying (and many others. everyone is grumpy).

3:05 am — Walk through biggest airport ever. Or is it a shopping mall? Why are there so many stores? And they are open? So delirious.

3:30 am — Find a nice couch to lay my head. Try to sleep on and off for the next few hours, but there are announcements every 3 minutes.

8:00 am — Wake up. The smell of Aunty Ann’s pretzels are too great to resist (How am I smelling still with this terrible cold?)…so we buy some pretzels. We order the garlic because it sounded excellent to us.

8:05 am — Head to the gate. Sit away from everyone so we are not the smelly kids, but we are most certainly the smelly kids with the most garlicky pretzels every created.

8:55 am — Take off from Bangkok for 5.5 hour flight to Denpasar, Indonesia.

2:15 pm — Land in Denpasar, Indonesia (more often known as Bali).

3:00 pm — Cleared customs and immigration. Walk outside and it is ONE THOUSAND degrees. Not really, but to me it might have well as been (especially compared to the cold in Korea). Still feeling so sick. Get accosted by everyone trying to give us a ride, a SIM card, a hotel, a tour…

3:30 pm — Buy a SIM Card, get local money and find the taxi stand.  Get a taxi to the hotel. Drive approximately one hour.

4:30 pm — Arrive at the hotel. We are in Kuta Beach, the one place we wanted to avoid at all costs. There are bros and drunk people on holiday everywhere. We were so proud of ourselves on the train to the airport that we figured had found a hotel so quickly. Immediately regret everything.

4:40 pm — Finally time to get some rest!

THE END.

I did get better eventually about 6 days later, but damn. This travel day would have been really annoying and something I didn’t want to do on a normal day, much less a day I was fighting a bad virus. Shout out to Scott for holding my backpack (along with his two bags) as often as I would let him and dealing with my frequent tears of frustration.

So there you have it…the other, not so pretty part of traveling.