Finding Green Garden

"I can't believe we're going to Khao Lak today! This is going to be amazing!" said the boy who has never been to Khao Lak before.

I think we all share his belief – but unbeknownst to Sennen, the fact that we made it so smoothly was a minor miracle. It all began last night at 1 am when I checked us in for our flight from Bangkok to Phuket. Only once I looked at the digital boarding passes did I notice that Emily was listed as Feigenbaum, not Frydrych. At 1 am, tired and eager to go to bed, I decided that this was a minor thing we could clear up when checking in at the airport. But as that sat, I realized that a ticket not matching the passenger's passport might not be an easily resolved trifle – especially not with highly procedural Thais.

So I called Thai Airways' 24-hour customer service line and had my worst fears confirmed. Emily would need to have her ticket corrected – which in this case could only be done by the travel agent who helped us buy the tickets and then could only happen if the travel agent or a member of his staff showed up in-person at a Thai Airways office – prior to our 2pm departure. Of course, if our travel agent couldn't do that, there was a procedure for same day emergencies where we could buy a new ticket and have Emily's existing seat transferred to the new ticket – and then get the old ticket refunded. This complex break-glass-in-case-of-emergency procedure could only take place after 8 am and then only if the travel agent had failed us.

I immediately emailed our Thai travel agent, Charlie – who I have done business with for 17 years. While it turned out that the whole thing was caused by a mistake his wife made months ago when rushing through a booking, to Charlie's great credit, he sprung into action at 6:30 am and by 7:30 had updated me on his plan. What came next is far too complicated and. uninteresting to relay except that the morning was filled with texts, calls, some discreet drama and things referred to as Plan A and Plan B as we headed off to the airport at 11 am.

So often, travel stories involve a string of bad, or worsening events that make the airline industry and air travel in general look terrible – especially around the holidays. But not today. Through either a strange twist of fate or some kind of cosmic Christmas present, as we walked up to the Thai Airways counter a manager came out to greet us an apologize deeply that Business Class had been overbooked and we would need to be moved to a bulkhead row in Economy. She couldn't have apologized more profusely and immediately explained that Thai Airways was prepared to give us 1000 Baht per person in cash for the inconvenience.

First, we hadn't realized we bought business class seats until Matheus noticed it on his digital boarding pass earlier in the morning. I had asked for a fare that would accommodate the weight of our baggage – which is below the international baggage allowance, but above the standard domestic one. It turns out that extra money I thought I spent on baggage was actually a great deal on Business Class tickets on what is a premium airline by any standard.

Thus, we allowed Thai Airways to make it up to us by executing Plan A and getting Emily back onto our flight using a mechanism of a rebooked ticket for the 7pm flight that Charlie had created. In reality, had Emily not been able to board our flight, she would have gone on the Plan B flight at 2:30 with Bangkok Airways and had her Thai ticket outbound segment refunded. But that became a moot point.

In the end, Thai Airways resolved our big problem at great haste, paid us 4000 Baht ($121) in cash and made sure we still had our Business Class privileges we didn't know we were going to have – such as the lounge, priority boarding and priority baggage. As far as we were concerned, the whole thing was a major coup.

After a very nice buffet lunch at the excellent Thai lounge, we happily boarded our very comfortable flight to Phuket. On arrival, our priority baggage came out promptly, our VIP shuttle service was easily located and took us first to the very nice supermarket in a town near where we would be staying and then to our house.

On paper, it was all seamless. And to the kids, I think it mostly was.

But in reality, the road journey here took almost double the time anticipated (1.5 hours instead of 45 minutes). We passed through a massive downpour along the way. The driver was never given the address of our house and had no idea how to get there even when we gave it to him. Our stop at the supermarket slowed things down in general. And by the end, the kids were just tired of travel and the day. Oh, and Ailyn was sad about leaving "her" Bangkok condo she loved – and Mr. Panya, the driver who did our airport runs and trip to Ayutthaya who incidentally said no more than five words to her in the course of seeing her four times.

It was on the side of the road in the nearby town of Nang Thong, after loading groceries in to the van that our very nice, but non-English speaking driver and I discovered that neither of us knew how to get to Green Garden Villa in Khao Lak. We huddled. We consulted Google. I looked through emails – and pointed to addresses in both English and Thai. He insisted that those addresses didn't yield results in Google Maps. He was right. We called our Airbnb host – a very nice Swedish man who doesn't speak Thai, but does give very detailed directions in English which make little sense if you've never seen the place and are driving in the dark.

After about 10 minutes, two concurrent miracles occurred:

1. We somehow got Google to recognize the name of our villa and and locate it on the map. I believe this was done through some feature of the Airbnb app.
2. I mentioned the name of a resort near our villa that could be used as a reference point. The driver's cousin had a wedding at that resort – and so he knew what to do.

In the end, we found our villa at almost 7 pm instead of the anticipated 5:30-6pm. And I haven't stayed anywhere as remote and hard to find since my old house in Bali before the nearby gas station opened at the corner, helping to mark the turn-off. We never would have gotten close without Google Maps, and even with them the owner of the house and to come driving down the road to find and guide us in via what can loosely be called something along the lines of either a long driveway or a private road.

But I believe we have found the beautiful, amazing place Sennen envisioned. This gorgeous Asian-Modern villa could certainly have been transplanted from Bali. With teak veneer kitchen cabinets, sleek, modern design and an incredibly well appointed kitchen, it makes perfect sense that the owner is Swedish. Moreover, the beach is down the road, we have a gorgeous and inviting swimming pool in the yard and it turns out there are taxis nearby that know where we are – even if it seems like this is the place someone running from the feds could successfully hole up for years without being found.

We ended our day of quiet dramas and victories with a dinner of Nutella, coconut and banana roti (what Emily found on the side of the road when I was huddling with the driver) and some yogurt. Our overtired children were then showered down and put to bed where they fell asleep within 60 seconds of their heads hitting the pillow.

The adults were then left to enjoy something we haven't heard in almost a week and a half: silence. We went from one extreme to the other – the constant chaos and noise of Bangkok to the solitude and deep calm of Khao Lak. How refreshing it is.