All posts tagged with "travel"

I am surprised that I have managed to go this long without telling any of you about my Las Vegas trip. There are a few stories to share, but not too many. Before I get to the point on this one, I'll mention a star-spotting.

I know that admitting this in print gets me labeled as a pussy by a lot of my faithful readers, but hey, I'm here to inform and educate. I spent one afternoon in the hotel spa, and got a massage and a facial. We all know what happens in a massage, but maybe not what goes on with a facial. Besides, there's someone out there who is curious about what goes on in a men's facial, and who will find this site through Goggle years from now.

I'm planning to post many web log entries from Thailand during my trip over there in the next two weeks. There is only one problem with that. Every time someone looks at pictures or wants to talk about my last trip there, they get hung up on one particular story. It was actually Heather who was pretty insistent on getting to see the filthy side of Bangkok. We packed in a lot of activity, and I can honestly say that we could not have experienced more cultural oddities than we did in such a short time. Thai smut is just one piece of the big puzzle.

This marks the first of many entries that I will make during my Thailand trip. I'm not sure exactly how this travel journal will play out, but I would expect it to differ in style frm the rest of the blog in some way or other. I'm making this entry from my PDA at the Baton Rouge airport, so it may be short.

It takes a really long time to get to Thailand. And then, when I finally made it there, we have a little airport/customs kerfuffle.

Being in Bangkok the second time is very different than being here for the first time. It isn't the city that has changed; it's just that the overwhelming sensation on the first visit is how very different and strange everything is. Now, the chaos seems familiar and natural. We have only done a couple of things around the town. The main thing was to go order and get fitted for custom clothes.

On Friday, Mom and I traveled to Ayuthaya province. This is about an hour outside of Bangkok, and was the capital up until about a thousand years ago. We started by touring ruins of a complex that may have been the palace or a temple. The ruins were pretty neat. It was much like touring an old fort in America in terms of how it looked. But obviously, the Thai's cement was a better mix than that of the American pioneers, since it was still holding strong, despite the handicap of an extra thousand years or so of exposure.

Somewhere between when the time when the Thai ladies were trying on Mom's fake boob and when the weird little guy put a hot towel while I was urinating, I knew it was time to go home.

Here's one amusing story: The place that we stayed had one of those bars that you could swim up and order food and drinks. Mom went up the last afternoon and ordered an ice cream sundae, which of course, Americans pronounce "sun-di." The Thai bartender looked puzzled. Mom repeated the order, and he continued to not understand. When she pointed it out on the menu, he actually corrected her English: "That's Sun-Day."

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In preschool a couple of weeks ago, Kolya's class made gingerbread men. When they went out to play, the teachers hid them, and they told the kids that the cookies came to life, ran around the classroom, and dared the kids to find them. The kids looked all over, inside and out, and they couldn't find the runaway gingers.

We decided to sail to Mandeville, a town that's usually four or five hours from our home dock. It's a pretty standard trip for us, but this one spirals into nuttiness.

We spent the week of Easter on the sailboat. Almost entirely, we were tied up at Pontchartrain Landing on the lakeshore. It's an almost unknown RV Park and Marina, and not at all a bad place to hole up for a week.

AFor the first time in many years, we went on Summer vacation without taking the helm of a sailboat. Instead, I took the helm of the motor van San Clemente< for a tour of the Pacific Northwest. We started out north of Seattle, ferried through the San Juan Islands of Washington, crossed over the Vancouver island in Canada. From there, we crossed British Columbia and visited several Canadian National Parks in their Rocky Mountain range. Finally, we circled back into Washington for a few days before heading home.

We went on a Covid-summer road trip that took us the whole Summer. The cat took an entirely different Summer vacation in the Ozarks.

We had a hell of a time getting to the Bahamas this Summer. Our friends Robert and Crystal might have even done worse than us. Also, some really pretty pictures in this post.

Our 2021 sailing trip to the Bahamas was an absolute disaster. Before we left, lightnight fried our boat's electronics. The generator didn't make it to Key West. And we lost tons of consumer electronics to Neptune as well. We managed to have some fun though. This is how the trip started.

Starlink is changing everything, and some of the sailors are maaaaaaddd about it.

We got off later than usual, but we're on the road again this summer. Here's how the first week+ of our trip has looked.

We continued to travel north and east, to the point now where we're just about out of continent. North America is huge. I did some interneting, and I'm almost exactly the same distance from Reykjavik, Iceland as we are from Baton Rouge.

More from Nova Scotia and Maine. Friends join us, and I come to the conclusion that a great deal of the fun I have in publishing these posts lies in making fun of my friends.

I'm going to write more words about octopuses here than you thought possible. Also, a little story-window into our Croatia trip last summer.

If you have to be querying other people's data all day, this isn't a bad place to do it. This is probably the last post about the summer road trip. I'm in New Hampshire, camping alone with only Rosie as company.

It's been a lot of driving lately. Coming back from Maine was two really long days. Camp pickup wasn't until 10:00. We left from there and drove until the wee hours. 11 states, and it was all bumper to bumper traffic from Maine through New Jersey.