2021 November Our Ill-Fated Trip to Thailand

 All of our travel arrangements (that you can read about in this post) had to be trashed after about one-half hour into the trip. We took Epic Mountain Express for a two-hour drive from Vail to Denver; it turned into an 8-hour horror and we missed our Qatar business class flight to Bangkok. In Frisco, the van was told that the I-70 was closed in Silverthorne due to a once-in-a-lifetime semi-truck accident in Georgetown. The semi turned over and the container caught on fire (fortunately the cab was separated from the container before the fire). Our van spent the 8 hours in a parking lot near the Safeway in Frisco. We got to know our fellow prisoners: the driver, Rob, Torry (Victoria), Justin, and Daniel. They turned out to be nice companions for the ordeal.

Fortunately, for the first time in our lives, we had hired a travel agent for this trip. Warwick Garner at Brownell gave us a couple of options for flying to Bangkok the next day, including paying something like US$20,000 to fly business on Qatar. We declined that option and chose an economy flight from Denver to Bangkok instead.

When we finally got to Denver we checked into the Westin at the Denver airport. We had a fine room (for around $500) and had dinner at the restaurant there. We slept, had breakfast and then went to the airport to start the 36-hour ordeal to Bangkok.

Flying economy on American from Denver to Chicago was okay--it was only 2 hours. From Chicago to Doha on Qatar we were in the 4-seat middle section. There was a man sitting next to Audre on the aisle. The Saudi man turned out to have useful information. He told us that the Qatar app has a clickable "purchase upgrade button". He showed us what it looked like on his phone. Our phone didn't have it. So we were told that we should go to the "purchase upgrade desk" when we got to Doha. By the time we got there, there was 1 business class seat left for $650. We bought it for Dimitri's 80th birthday present.

So Dimitri got to check out the QSuite and the food and the libations and he said it was REALLY worth it. Next time we travel by plane, we will go to Denver the day before, book business class and hope for better luck.

We started at 11 am on a Tuesday from Vail and got to Koh Samui at 3 pm on Friday (which in Vail was 1 am on Friday). It took us 3 days to get to the Four Seasons Koh Samui.

Click on "Older Post" (yes, it is counterintuitive) or the arrow on the right under the comment box, to read our next post and to continue the saga.

Click here for the Thailand photo album. 

(You might need to open a Google account to see our photos. Click on the "i" in the top ribbon and look at the  description at the bottom of the list.)