A Step Off The Beaten Path

We left Phoenix on the 13th and spent the next 21 relatively painless hours traveling before finally arriving at 2:30am (through some strange time warp in the way int’l travel works) on the 15th. It took a while to make it through the passport check, collect our bags, and take a taxi to our hotel in downtown Bangkok.  So we arrived, exhausted, at 5am hoping the hotel would take pity on us and allow us (very) “early check in” for our room. They did!

Turns out that our hotel is right next to Lumphini Park, a really large, beautiful park that is remarkable for its decorated pavilions, water features, outdoor exercising equipment (and a ton of people using it), and for supporting a sizable population monitor lizards. These things are enormous!

As luck would have it, we arrived on Day 3 of the 5-day Thailand Tourism Festival 2016, an absolutely HUGE cultural festival that celebrates and shares all things Thai with locals and visitors through music, singing dance as well as countless booths selling all manner of foods, clothing, arts and crafts, etc. Anna and I went that first night (everyone else fell asleep back at the room!) and we lasted about an hour before we the sheer scale and “foreignness” of it all overwhelmed us. Now that we’re better rested, we hope to return tonight and really take it all in.

Tomorrow night, we catch a train to Chiang Mai, where we hope to settle in for the next few weeks. We knew Chiang Mai to be located in the north of Thailand. However, we didn’t anticipate that it would be a 14 hour train ride to get there! In the spirit of figuring things out as we go, we went to the train station today to purchase tickets. And guess what? All the sleeper car seats are sold out! Another adventure awaits! 🙂