Ash went to the Sunday market with the girls while I wrote in Simple Thai Cafe. It felt good for me to be working on this project. There were times when I still felt guilty for not working and advancing my career somehow, but it had made me start thinking about what my career really was. Since I left college, I’ve trained athletes in sports performance, planned corporate meetings all over the country, and fundraised for a nonprofit. I don’t have a career; I have experiences. I don’t think traveling the world and writing a book about this travel was necessarily a bad next step in life. This book was giving me a different kind of experience; it was giving me a sense of purpose.
Apparently, shopping was giving my girlfriend purpose. I returned to find Ash with a bed full of clothes, umbrellas, and blankets. “Ashhhhh …”
“Kyle, I don’t know what happened. One minute I was just perusing the vendors, and the next thing I know, I had bags full of stuff.” So what do you do when your girlfriend goes somewhere so cool that she blacks out and buys tons of things? You go check it out for yourself.
This Sunday market made the night bazaar look like a yard sale. It was only four blocks from our place, and hosted a long stretch of vendors selling their crafts. It was like Etsy had come to life. Unfortunately, we continued buying things because the value-to-price ratio was just too good. We bought gifts for people, a wedding present for my sister, and a few things for ourselves. The reality set in when we got home that we were leaving this house tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. and all the stuff we had just purchased had to come with us. What the hell were we thinking?
Ash told me to get out of the way and just let her go to work because I “packed like an asshole.” Fair enough—I’ll accept the insult for the lack of work I had to do. I hit the steam room, and when I returned, she had packed every single item into our two bags. Wow, I really do pack like an asshole, I thought.
We tried to get some sleep, but the excitement level of what we were doing tomorrow was far too high. Tomorrow we were going to spend the night at the Elephant Nature Park (ENP), deep in the jungles of Thailand. This was unequivocally the aspect of the trip I was most excited for.