We set alarms this morning so we could pack up and have breakfast before our taxi picked us up at 8AM. We loaded into the back of an island taxi, which is the bed of a pickup truck with benches on either side, and rode the windy roads to the pier. At the pier we loaded into the large speed boat that took us to the mainland. I’ll miss these islands.

I sat next to a monk and loved the color story happening beside me. Red seats, neon orange life jackets, burnt orange robe. Blue floor, blue flip flops, blue sky and ocean out the window.

Even though it was 9am, Millie fell asleep. Nothing knocks her out like a boat ride. We arrived at the mainland an hour later.

As we were getting off, we noticed an ambulance waiting to pick up an injured tourist. She was on crutches with a bandaged up leg and seemed to be in a lot of pain. We have seen SO many tourists with white bandages wrapping up their limbs. Usually it is on one side of their body and there is plenty of road rash accompanying it. At our hotel in Koh Mak we saw a dad on crutches and his son, who couldn’t have been older than 4, had a scraped up face and was missing his four front teeth. My assumption is these are all moped/scooter accidents, since that seems to be how most tourists get around. I will never get on one of these.

Speaking of safety, this time I booked a large van to drive us the 5 hours back to the city. I didn’t want a repeat of our crazy driver from last time. We loaded up and had a much more reasonable driver back to Bangkok. It was 5 hours. I napped and Millie watched movies.

We stopped for a bathroom and snack break and went a little crazy getting interesting chips to try. I liked all of them. Butter corn was too buttery for me to have many. I polished off the salted egg bag.

We arrived at our hotel in Bangkok. It is a Hyatt Place that I booked with points. It’s modern and new, but not particularly fancy. When we walked in Millie said “now this is the kind of hotel I like!” I asked her why and she described what she calls “fancy things” – paintings, stone countertops, and soft lighting.

Yesterday at the floating restaurant she described it as “this is very poor”, meaning no money rather than describing the quality. She isn’t wrong, but it is interesting to see her notice the difference between “nice” and “poor”. We have been trying to find the lessons in it all: different countries have different amounts of wealth, this shows up in things like houses and restaurants, “poor” doesn’t mean it’s bad or that the people are unhappy, it’s important to be thankful for what we have, etc. It all feels complicated to explain to a little kid, especially when I have all sorts of feelings around it too.

After we vegged out in the hotel room for a while we walked out to get dinner at a local brewpub. We have been eating exclusively Thai food so changing it up sounded good. It ended up being very overpriced and not great.

We had some more time to kill so we walked around the mall next door to find some items on our shopping list. I got a pair of replacement pants at Uniqlo. I’m desperate for a new book and we found a huge bookstore. Unfortunately they were all art and reference books — not a novel in sight! We will continue the search for the things we need tomorrow.