Nothing can ever, EVER be simple when I’m with my family. However, this vacation’s challenge proved to be one of the craziest things we’ve ever had to figure out.

While we were traveling in Australia, one of Indonesia’s active volcanoes erupted.

Since it’s a known active volcano, no big deal right?

Eehhhh wrong.

The aftereffects of this volcano, coupled with non-favorable winds have had the Denpasar Airport shut down now for OVER a week.

OVER A WEEK!

At first I was pretty confident that this would be over in a few days… but our flight to Bali is in a day and a half at 12:20 in the morning… and they’re not announcing if the airport is viable until midnight each day. So we had to make a decision today. Because this is ABSOLUTE INSANITY.

I went into crisis mode as soon as we landed here in Darwin, and we haven’t been out of the hotel all night trying to re-route everything. We don’t have phones obviously, so we’ve been on skype calls with various different providers. After some discussion as a group (read: arguments), we decided to just skip Bali and jump to Bangkok, Thailand, so we can keep the rest of our flight route intact. PLUS Jetstar routes to Bangkok, which is the airline we were going to Bali on, so we were hoping to get everything easily sorted.

HAH

Matt was on the phone with Jetstar for HOURS before finally getting escalated to someone who could help him. They kept telling him that since it wasn’t the day of our flight, they couldn’t change our itinerary yet. He kept trying to explain that we had a 12:20am flight and that was not an acceptable response. FINALLY he got someone helpful. I’ve been on with United trying to get our flights for Bangkok changed up so we can spend time there, but actually leave the country via Phuket and then get to Japan with some extra days there as well. Changing the flights with United was actually easy, but the ticketing office, since they were award tickets, couldn’t determine the cost of the flights, so the WAIT for that was over half an hour. On Skype on a rickety connection. Nerve-wracking doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Oh, not to mention while I was waiting for United, I was searching online for a cheap flight on Thai Airwaysto get us from Bangkok to Phuket so we could USE the flight I was booking with United. That was actually pretty slick but their site and confirmations are so informal looking, I was terrified. UGH.

On top of ALL of this, Mom was prepping to call the Marriotts to make changes and try to book new hotels for us, since now we didn’t have anywhere to stay.

FINALLY I was set with United while Matt was still on with Jetstar. He wrapped up about 20 minutes after me, and we sat down to help mom.

Mind you, it’s about 9pm at this point.

We decided to break to get dinner. Oh, by the way, NOTHING IS OPEN LATE IN DARWIN!

We RUSHED to a local pizzaria to grab a pie before they closed, and then it was back to the grindstone in the room.

We got mom on the phone with Marriott and she first cancelled our Bali reservation… and then was on for about 3 more hours trying to figure out Bangkok, Phuket and Tokyo… because we weren’t supposed to be STAYING in any of those cities. 

Finally…. FINALLY at about 1:30am when we had bookings everywhere, even though we weren’t 100% satisfied, I called it because our tour the next day had a pickup at 6am.

Exhausted, but triumphantly, we all crawled into bed to pass out. Although we were insanely frustrated… in less than 10 hours we had essentially re-imaged the entire last third of our trip! We had flights booked all the way home, places to stay, and generic ideas of things we wanted to do. Honestly, I couldn’t believe it!

Well…. here’s to a whirlwind rest of the vacation — Thailand and Japan, here we come!