We are now down to a little less than 4 weeks until we leave, and it seems like the time is going quickly.  There is less than 15 school days left so the kids are counting that down also, and we are all trying to get loose ends tied up before we go.

We have confirmed Russill’s flight plans also, and he will be connecting with us in Tokyo at the start of the trip and joining us for about 3 weeks.

Now that we have some specific targets (we need to have Russill back to Bangkok for his flight home on July 15) we have started to rough out an agenda:

• A) Bangkok
• B) Phuket
• C) Krabi
• D) Koh Samui
• E) Bang Saphan
• F) Hua Hin
• G) Chiang Mai

We are still planning to ‘free flow’ our day to day agenda and likely will not commit to much more than 2-3 days of advance booking at a time but are roughly planning to be in Krabi or Koh Samui around about the time that Russill needs  to depart back to Canada.

All of our documents came back from the Thai Embassy, and we all have our 60 day tourist visas now, and we have started taking our immunization pills, so travel wise we are in good shape.

We still need to get our luggage plan figured out, and likely borrow a few backpacks or good travel bags, as our old luggage is looking a little tired, and would not really be the preferred bags for wandering around anyway.  I’m sure that like so many other things we will pick up stuff along the way, so don’t want to take too more from here than we have to.

Sadly it looks like the dollar is losing a bit to the Thai Bhat, so my 300 Bhat massage looks like it has gone up by about $0.30 or so.  On the flip side, the global tourism industry continues to weaken – I saw flights to Australia for about $300 each way this week – so perhaps my ability to haggle the 300BHT price tag down to 200BHT is getting better 🙂

All in all we are looking forward to a great adventure, and the excitement is starting to ramp up as the departure date gets closer.

It turns out that getting ready for a big trip only seems to bring attention to the list of things you either never though about, or have been putting off to deal with another day…

For us that seems to be some things that we really should have gotten around to a while ago, but never did – like putting together all of our ‘documents’ like getting our safe-deposit box cleaned up, wills in order, and other ‘official’ type stuff that one should try and keep up to date.  Additionally, there is the specific travel related stuff like immunizations, travel visas, checking your health coverage, etc. And then for me getting all of my computer and server updates done 🙁

We have gotten a fair bit done on getting our documents cleaned up.  We just completed a re-finance (which always seems like way more paperwork than it needs to be) and were able to lock in a 5.0% 30yr rate with $0 in fees – no fees buried in the balance, no closing costs, no appraisal fees, nada, and they did it all over the phone and by mail, so other than having to go through a 3/4″ thick document package, relatively painless.  We also have spent a little time getting old accounts closed, our retirement accounts cleaned up, and some of our old Canadian papers sorted out, but the more we work at it, the more we realize it needs to be done – so not exactly travel related, but one of those things you think about as you are getting your travel documents all squared away.

On the travel front, we need to get all of our travel paperwork done – we needed to get our passports up to date (Laurie and the Kids’ were close to expiring and needed to be renewed) so that we could send them away to get our travel visas for Thailand.  The visa process for going to Thailand can be a little confusing – as a tourist you can spend a total of 90 days in Thailand over the course of a year, but not on a single visa – you can get a 30 day tourist visa at the border or airport when you arrive, but after 30 days you must leave and re-enter the country if you want to stay longer.  There is also a 60 day visa, but you must apply for that through the Thai Embassy before you travel – after the 60 days you must leave, and then you can re-enter on a 30 day visa if you wanted.  As we will be there more than 30, but less then 60 days we decided it was easier to get the 60 day visa than it would be to exit and re-enter the country, so we had to get all our stuff together, complete the visa application and get it all sent off to the Thai Embassy in Washington – hopefully our approved documents will arrive sometime this week and we can cross that off our list.

Next on our list was immunizations – almost any travel to the tropics requires us northerners to be prepared to be exposed to things that just don’t exist here: Hepatitis, Yellow fever, Malaria, etc.  Fortunately, a visit to the CDC website let’s us know that only some of those things are active where we are going, but we do need to get immunized for Hep A/B, and typhoid, so it is off to the doctor to get some shots.  Fortunately Hep A/B is part of what they immunize kids for now, so they only need to get the typhoid vaccine.  We are choosing to get the pill form of the typhoid vaccine – it is good for 5 years (vs 2 years for the injection form), and the doctor has also prescribed us some other travel meds like Cipro (for ‘travellers tummy’) just in case we encounter some foods we don’t agree with. For anyone who is planning a trip to another country it is good to look all this up in advance, because some of these medications need to be taken well in advance of travel – again the CDC website is very helpful here.

Finally, I have spent a bunch of evenings getting my ‘technology’ all updated, new tools installed, etc. This blog, our family photo gallery, my phone system, email, etc. are all hosted on a private server, and that needed a bunch of upgrades and some new packages installed so that I could work and communicate while we are away.  It all needed to be done anyway, but the travel plans gave me the needed ‘kick in the pants’ to actually get it done.  We suffer from Shoemaker’s Children syndrome around here when it comes to computers – I am around them so much for work that it is a little draining to try and keep all the home PCs and everything up to date, so they often go for long periods of time without getting any attention at all.

I guess all in all it is good to be getting this stuff done now rather than trying to stuff it all in to the last few days before we go – I’m sure we will have plenty to keep us busy then 🙂

Our plan for this big adventure has so far been to try and keep our travel plans as flexible as possible, the intent being that if something changes or sparks our interest we can just ‘go with the flow’ and take advantage of the flexibility.

As I mentioned in my last post, a recent seat sale for in-country air travel made us make a few decisions and some slight changes to our overall travel plan.

Initially, we had planeed to start our journey in the northern part of the country and make our way down the Gulf of Thailand and then over to the Andaman Sea, and then flying from the south back up to Bangkok for the trip home.  As we started to look at the places we could fly to and the flights that were available we made some choices and changed things around a little.

We are now going to start in the south on the Andaman Sea side and then do the whole thing basically in reverse of what we had originally planned.  We booked some tickets from Bangkok to Phuket for the 28th of June, so that gives us a couple of days in Bangkok when we get there to adjust to the local timezone, and to see a few sights, and then off to the beach….

During our couple of days in Bangkok we hope to see the Grand Palace, and take a boat tour of the river system (khlong) that runs through the city.  For 100s of years the khlongs were the primary method of traveling and moving transporting goods and significant distance in Thailand, and are still quite active today for tourism, floating markets, and general movement of goods and people.

With a population of over 10 million and roughly twice the size of Los Angeles, Bangkok is estimated to be the 22nd largest city in the world, so 2 days hardly seems like enough time to do it any justice, so we have also planned for few days at the end of our trip to spend some extra time there.  Fortunately for me I was able to negotiate the shopping portion of our Bangkok visit to the last part so that we will not have to carry any treasures we find in the market around with us for 7 weeks 🙂

We did also make an adjustment to our return flight so that we could get some better connections so we are now returning on Aug 11th instead of the 10th as originally planned – this will make us late for dinner on the 10th Vicki, so please don’t wait for us, we will just show up instead on Tuesday 😛

Well just when we thought we were getting things all roughed out on what we thought our journey might look like, something changes.  Usually change is good, and as we are finding out more and more as we plan this trip, this time is no exception…

The latest change is an Air Asia seat sale!! Now who would have thought you would need to have a seat sale when the price of a ticket from one end of the country to the other (think Seattle to San Francisco, or Edmonton to Vancouver for the Canadians in the audience) is normally around $50US, but we discovered last night that most destinations in Thailand have been discounted to $99BHT  (the current exchange making that the princely sum of $2.81US) – of course with all the taxes and airport fees that will jump substantially to just under $10US to basically fly anywhere in-country, but I think we will be able to suffer through it!!!  I suspect it will cost me more to get the family to the airport on the songthaew (kinda of like an open-air taxi) than the cost of the airfare and taxes.  Clearly our domestic airlines could learn some lessons here.

We had originally planned to maybe take the train up north to Chiang Mai and only take the plane a couple of times for the longer hops we had in mind (down to Phuket for example).  The train takes the better part of a day (or overnight on the night train) and would cost about $18US so initially it looked like a good choice, and a bit of an experience, but now for about 1/2 that we can make the same journey in about 1/10th of the time and get more time ‘on the ground’ at our final destination.  The experience won’t be the same, but I suspect we will not be lacking on opportunities for experiences in the time that we are there.

Additionally, we may now make some other short hops that we had dismissed before.  We had looked at places in the north-east, and eastern part of Thailand like Udon Thani but had removed them from our list because if we were going to go to these places that were so far apart then we would either rack up a fair amount of air travel costs (think 5 people x $50 per person), or lose a lot of adventure time sitting on a bus or train.  It also opens up the option for us of going to a completely different country in the area if for some reason we were so inclined – flights to most of the surrounding countries have been discounted to $12US, so about $20US with all the fees.  In fact, one of Rachael’s gym friends spends the summer in Singapore, so things like this make it possible to look at popping around to ‘bump into’ people we know, just 1/2 way around the globe.

At the end of the day hard to know if it will change our list of places to go or not, but it has made us start thinking again about places we had pushed off to a list for perhaps a future trip.