We came to Thailand on our honeymoon and now we’re back, with kids. We’re on our way to Chiang Mai for 6 months, but decided to stop in Bangkok for a night to recover before flying again. If it was just adults we would have done it in one go, but with the kids we wanted a bit of breathing room.

I did start to regret this when I remembered that we have kids but no car seats so couldn’t just take a taxi to our hotel. It was 6am Thai time at this point (1am UK time) and we hadn’t slept.

After a quick £5 data roam on the phone (sigh) we found that there was a shuttle but finding it was another matter.

We seemed to be pointed to lots of non-descript corners with no obvious signposts or shuttles that didn’t have labels showing where they were headed. Eventually we found a member of staff from our hotel amongst a sea of people holding hand written placards. She had a sheet of paper with what I’m assuming was the hotel logo, but no other writing. Goodness knows how Karl figured out she was our contact.

Were told to wait in another non-descript corner for 10 minutes. After a bit of nail-biting on my part (Karl was more confident), we were taken out to our shuttle (hurray).

It was all up from here.

When we got to the hotel we were reminded of why we loved Thailand so much the first time. As soon as we got out of the shuttle there were smiling staff there to take our bags to our room. It was honestly like being in a 5 star hotel (but for £20 per night). They took our bags and key and walked us to the lovely, spacious room with white walls and dark wood. There they proceeded to put the key in the socket, set our air con, turn on our TV and draw the curtains for us before bowing and leaving.

At which point all 4 of us crashed for a blissful, blissful nap.

In the afternoon we went to the local market. We stuck out like a sore thumb (2 white kids in a double buggy!) but all the attention was positive. Loads of people wanted to squeeze Cade’s chunky little legs and the boys even got given a free jelly shot from one of the stalls. I sense that these are going to be a favourite while we’re in Thailand.

We were hungry so gorged a bit on all the delicious street food. I love that Thailand’s so clean that you can eat street food safely. I’m afraid there are no pics because the food went far too quickly. Oops!

Jack gained more attention when we bought him a hotdog on a stick. Apparently this was particularly cute, although eventually we did take it off him and pass him chunks of it instead because a Thai lady pointed out (excuse the pun) that the end of the skewer was sharp.

Sated and happy we went back to our hotel to sleep and prepare for the last leg of our journey.