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 😛