And so it begins 🙂  After a lengthy amount of time on planes and in airports we have arrived back in the Land of Smiles.  Our plane got in to Chiang Mai at about 9am this morning and we have begun to start the acclimatization process.  It was a paltry 82F here at 9am when we got off the plane with the temperature expected to get into the low 90s by mid-day – a huge change from the crappy start to summer we had so far in June back home.

We spent a little time this morning getting ourselves setup with some local currency, a Thai SIM card for our cellphone and a walk around the neighborhood near our hotel.  We have booked a few nights in at the Raiming Lodge (the same place we stayed last year) as it was a place we knew and would give us a chance to look around before deciding what to do next.  We are patiently waiting for 3pm to roll around so that we can get started on our massage regimen 🙂 so we popped out to one of the numerous eateries for a Thai lunch (Tom Yum soup for me and Chicken with Cashew Nut for Laurie), add a couple of fresh fruit shakes and you are well fed and watered for $6.

We are not certain if it is some additional slowdown of the low season, but it seems very quite here today.  We had heard that tourism had taken some hit from the protests earlier in the year in Bangkok, but it seems VERY quiet in downtown Chiang Mai.  Perhaps it has something to do with the World Cup – lots of pubs here are advertising the games, and with many of them being on at hours that Mrs Columbus and I are well into sleep land maybe everyone is up late for the games and just sleeping off the morning.

Our plan is to head out tonight for the Saturday night market – it is about 30 blocks of impromptu shops, street food, street performers, etc.  Laurie and the girls went last year when we were here and came back reasonably well loaded down with treasures, so we will see what we can find this year.

Tis all I got for now…..

I just can’t wait to get on the road again….

In an odd twist of events, our summer travel plans have been all over the map – literally!  Initially Brooklyn and I were going to go for her ‘grad trip’ back to Thailand, but then in what appears to be an almost yearly event, some political protests turned into civil unrest and it looked like Thailand was going to be off the table for travel.  Between that and a change of jobs for Brooklyn, she has decided to post-pone her trip for another time.  She really wants to go back to Thailand and wants to be able to do it when she knows her schedule is not in flux, and that her destination is not subject to change.

At any rate as we were doing all the planning, Mrs Columbus decided that she was going to come along, so when Brooklyn put her trip off, we started to look at other places the 2 of us could go for a little R&R.  We looked at Costa Rica, the Caribbean, and some spots in South America, but it seemed like Mother Nature was mostly working against us – volcanoes erupting in Ecuador and Guatemala, a giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the start of what is predicted to be a very active hurricane season in the Caribbean seemed to just put some sort of dark cloud over each spot we started looking at.

And then the odd twist of fate happens – after about 4-5 weeks of protests in Bangkok, the whole thing ends with a couple of days of rioting and a crackdown by the Thai military.  After a couple of weeks it seems that all is normal back in our beloved Land of Smiles – so one morning on the weekend there we are sitting down having some breakfast bantering about where on our narrowing short list of places we should go, or if we should just give up and stay home, and Mrs Columbus gets on the phone to see what our options are like for points tickets.  And then BAM, after weeks of indecisiveness she spent a couple of hours on the phone, and just booked them.

Our final destination – yup, back to Thailand 🙂  We figured if we are going to use up our points we might as well get good value for them, and Mrs Columbus feels good about places she knows, and after the great time we had in Asia last year, you just can’t go wrong with something you know and love.

I finally got my act together and got my holiday photos sorted out – a couple of the programs I use to clean them up and get them posted to the website were broken for a while last fall, and I got woefully behind.  That left me with a daunting task to get caught up, so it was easy to put it off for a while……

At any rate, I have now posted photos from:

 Our few days on the boat in Campbell River

 Brooklyn’s Senior photos

 Jackie’s Soccer

 Christmas with the family

 Our holiday gatherings with friends and neighbors

 Rachael’s gymnastics

Click on the links to see the full galleries