We arrived back in Chiang Mai and have scaled the pace of the trip back from 11 to a leisurely 4. We have more time here so are not as rushed, and Mrs Columbus and I have been here a couple of times before so we have a reasonable feel for things that are worth seeing and stuff that we can take a pass on.

We have reacquainted ourselves with our friend Sopa who owns the massage place and are happy to see a familiar face (and of course the massage is good too).  We spend a little time chatting about things that have changed since we were here last year and then Brooklyn opts for a haircut while the rest of us get a foot massage.

We spent today walking around the old city and hanging out in the hotel pool – basically just doing a bunch of relaxing, after all that’s what vacations are for 🙂  It is nice to see that the city seems a little more active than last year – there were many businesses that closed last year due to the extra slow tourist season they had in 2010.

We did make one great find today – while out walking around we saw a restaurant and guesthouse that I recognized from some of my reading on the internet.  The guesthouse (Ginny Place) is owned by an American originally from the Seattle area, and his Thai wife – they recently took over some additional space and added a restaurant (Ginny Cafe) serving a mix of American and Thai foods.  ‘Captain Bob’ has been very helpful a few times providing information and answers to questions about Thailand and the Chiang Mai area, so I figured it would be great to pop in and say hi, and also to try out the new restaurant.  In our past couple of visits we had some ok food, but we had not yet found a real ‘go-to’ place for great, well priced food in Chiang Mai – I think that search is over!!  We had lunch at Ginny Cafe and the food was fantastic!  We decided fairly quickly that we would come back for dinner and try out a few other dishes to see if we had just made some good choices, or if all the food was as good.  Well dinner lived up to all of our expectations so I am sure we will make several more visits during our stay here.

Tomorrow we are going to meet up with Riam who has been our tour guide of excellence the last couple of trips, and discuss some different things that we might do while we are here.

And that is a wrap for another day in paradise…..