Day 20: November 13th

This morning we got all packed up, checked out of our rooms, and went and got shakes from the place across from where we ate last night. Our guys shop still wasn’t open. We were supposed to be back to the resort by 10:30am where we were gonna get picked up and taken to our bus.  We sat there till 11:10am and finally decided to go talk to the travel lady and find out why we hadn’t been picked up yet. She was quite surprised to see us and started calling people. Come to find out there had been an accident or something that was holding everybody up so our departure time got moved to 2:00pm. We were already all packed up and checked out so there was really nothing to do. The Internet was pretty slow and the beach was really rocky so we went to the same restaurant we ate at last night  (he had opened up). Got some drinks and all enjoyed some Pad Thai. Chatted with the owner for a bit……looked at magazines……..played on the iphone and pretty much just slowly waited for the time to pass. A nice truck came and picked us up and brought us to the minibus station where about fourteen of us loaded on. They dropped some people off and picked others up, and at one point there were 18 people of us in the minibus even though the seat capacity was 16.  They had initially told us we couldn’t  get dropped off at the airport, and that we would be taken to Phuket Town which was a long taxi ride from the airport. But then the minibus stopped at the airport and it seemed like a good idea to just get out there.  For some reason they said that they had to charge us an extra B100 per person if we got out early. We pretended we couldn’t understand his English in hopes that we could get out of the extra charge, but it didn’t work J. Unfortunately all we thought about was saving ourselves from a taxi fare the next day, and not about the increased food and sleeping costs. Apparently there was no lodging around the airport, at least not anything we could afford and the food costs were as bad as in American airports. We found a little tourist lounge where we decided to camp out for free and splurge on getting some good. It was probably close to 8pm and we were all starved. Burger King was the pick. The boys both ordered a double bbq bacon cheeseburger meal and I ordered a chocolate shake on the agreement that Bruce would share his fries with me. The cheeseburgers ended up being tiny and they were atrociously expensive lol. My large shake ended up looking like an extra large and so the boys had to help me out. There was probably half of it left and Bruce and I were sick of it. Brent volunteered to finish it up and literally slicked it up in a minute lol. Headed back to our lovely hang out and had a very restless night. We’d fall asleep and then a ton of people would come in and everything echoed like crazy. This happened off and on all night. The grand finale was when there was finally peace some Taxi driver decided to pound on the window and wake us all up yelling something we couldn’t make out. It was still completely dark out. He didn’t stop pounding until he had successfully woken every one of us up. He tried to come in the door but it was chained shut thankfully. =)