Hard to believe how fast the time is flying by. It seems like just yesterday since I wrote my last post, but we are rapidly running out of days.
The kids are gleefully counting down the number of days of school left (10) and the reality of our big adventure is really starting to set in for everyone. We had a birthday party over the weekend for Rachael, and her friends have helped her out with some spending money for while she is gone – along with a decent array of gift cards, ‘product’, and candy. I think she and her friends had a great time, and it was nice for so many of them to be able to get together before the end of the school year. Jackie’s birthday on the other hand will not be until after we are in Thailand, so we will have to be more creative for that one, but whatever it is, for us it will certainly be original.
As we scratched this weekend off, we looked at the calendar for the remaining days and realized we still have a fair amount of things we want to get done, but a decreasing amount of time to do them. I still have a business trip to squeeze in, and we want to try and spend some time with our friends here as the summer ‘officially’ starts.
We learned this week that we will be meeting up with more people that we know from here while on our vacation. One of Rachael’s friends from the gym will be traveling with her family in SE Asia and is going to work in a few days in their schedule to meet up with us in Koh Samui. It is amazing how small the world really is sometimes when people from a community like Woodinville can meet up on a beach on the opposite side of the world. We will be molding our travel path slightly to make everything work, by swapping the order we were planning to go to Krabi and Koh Samui in, but fortunately they are close enough together that everything will still work out fine, and the girls will have some familiar faces around for a few days.
We also need to finish up with our travel vaccinations, and this week will be getting our 2nd round of the Hepatitis A/B shots. Getting those done will be the last set of shots before we leave, and after that we should be all set for a few years should we decide to do something like this again in the future. We are also trying to get in all of our various visits and checkups with the dentist, orthodontist, etc so that we don’t find any surprises while we are gone, but also so that we are not scrambling to catch up once we get back.