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.

The days of the pioneering explorer, traveling with nothing but a local guide and all the supplies they could carry are clearly over.  With technology marching forward at a constant pace the modern traveler has unlimited access to information about any location on the planet, and low cost gadgets to record their adventures and to bridge the distance back to wherever home may be.

Our trip to Asia will certainly not be the pioneering adventure of the past – traveling with a collection of high-tech gadgets will allow us to be well informed about where we are, where the local amenities are, and will also allow us to keep our friends and family entertained and updated with tales of our experiences.  Part of this need for some gadgetry is because I will be working part of the time while I am there.  One of the great things about my job is the ability to telecommute, and with my developers spread out across the globe, other than dealing with the timezone issues, working from a different location should not be too different from what we are already used to.

I started looking at the things we would like to take, and while there are tons of cool gadgets available for the traveler, we have to think carefully about how much things weigh and how much space they occupy – it will be plenty hot and humid enough there without me having to carry a backpack full of gadgets around!!  Also, we need to keep in mind that the power is different there (240v vs 120v), so many of our battery powered gadgets will need to be charged either via a USB charger off a laptop or via a 240v compatible charger.  Some of the things we are going to be taking are:

1. A couple of laptops – my trusty MacBook Pro and Laurie’s IBM Thinkpad.  I need my laptop for work, and between the 2 laptops we should be able to keep up with email, blogging, and instant messaging back to work and family.
2. Digital camera’s – these are so small and inexpensive that we will likely have more than we need 🙂 We have a couple of Casio’s and a Nikon that will be making the trip, and with a few extra SD memory cards and my laptop to upload photos to, we should have a great photo record of the whole trip.  With any luck we will be able to upload some of them as we go to our website.
3. GPS Datalogger – something that is getting more common in the digital photo world is geotagging, this allows you to record the GPS location of where a photo was taken and then attach the photos to a map, or to a ‘track’ of your journey.  A datalogger records your GPS position every 30 seconds or so and then at a later time merges the data into your photos based on the timestamps of the records.  I picked up an iBlue 747A+ from Semsons.com – about the size of a box of wooden matches, it just clips to your belt or pack and records away.  For about $70 it will be an interesting experiment and really cool once I get it all setup.
4. VoIP phone – I will need to make calls for work from time to time, but the rate to call from Thailand to the US/Canada would make long calls cost prohibitive, but I picked up a Linksys WIP310 wifi VoIP phone.  This should allow me to make calls through our office phone system to people at the office, customers, and back home.

The good news is that so far all of the stuff we are planning to take will all work with the power there in terms of recharging, and other than the laptops it will all fit in a small day pack.  So if we are able to stay fairly close to spots with good internet connectivity and working power it will be almost like being at home 😉

Now that we have booked the tickets, and know the when, the next step is to figure out the where.  Our current plan is to try and avoid a fixed schedule as much as possible – this should allow us first of all to not have to figure out hotel reservations and such for 7 weeks all from here, but with the side benefits of not being stuck in a specific hotel if we arrive and find out it does not match the web description, or of we decide that a particular area is more interesting than expected and which to stay longer.

That said, we do have to try and figure out roughly the areas we want to see so that we can have a general plan.  Thailand is roughly the size of Spain in land area, but with the long tail going down towards Malaysia it is more spread out, so even with about 7 weeks ‘in country’ there is no way to see it all without doing some sort of very stressful power tour – and this trip is all about the slow casual pace, so power touring is out!

There are about 65 Million people in Thailand, and 10 Million of those live in Bangkok, so for those of you that know me, you will understand that a lot of time there is not high on my list 🙂  We are told by others that have been there and some of the travel guides we have been reading that there are a few things worth actually seeing there and so we will try and spend 2 or 3 days there either at the start of our trip or right at the end.

So far we are talking about spending a little time in the northern part of the country, staying in Chiang Mai (towards the north-west corner) and taking day trips to see the sights.  The north is all inland and mountainous, but is where a lot of the things that Thailand is known for come from.  Much of the manufacturing is done in this region, so if you are sitting at your teak patio furniture this summer and it was made in Thailand, there is a good chance it was made in or around Chaing Mai.  This city also seems to be a focal point for learning Thai cooking, something both Jackie and I are interested in, so schedule permitting we may take some time to learn a few dishes for when we come home.  The inland part of the country is also where much of the traditional Thai crops are grown – Thailand is the world’s largest producer of rice – and it would be interesting to see some rice paddies in full production, and show the kids that it does not actually come from a bag at the supermarket.

The bulk of the time we intend to spend in the south, in the costal areas – no point in going to the tropics without staying near the beach!!  Our thinking is to hop our way down the coast and some of the islands and spend a week or so in each of several places.  Spots that have made the short list so far include: Hua Hin, Koh Samet, and Koh Samui on the Gulf of Thailand side, and Krabi, Koh Phi Phi Don (pictured) and Phuket on the Andaman Sea side.  (Phuket itself is an island about the size of O’ahu in Hawaii and consists of a dozen or so beach towns that you could easily spend a handful of days in each town.)

With already 6 or 7 places on the list it looks like it is time to do some more research……