A Plan, Sort Of.....

Woke up with no plan whatsoever. I love that. But things always seem to formulate over breakfast....

We've found that all we really need is even a tiny seedling of a plan, just enough to get us out and moving. Whether or not that plan comes to fruition or not (it rarely does) is completely irrelevant, it's the having of a plan that's important. Today the kudos of plan formulation go to Duncan. He came up with one that involved a walk, a bus, a park, a museum and a boat ride. Well, one out of five isn't bad.

It turned out to be a rather random day. We stumbled upon a nice little temple in town (not too unusual in Thailand, I now realize) on the walk to the bus stop. Got to the bus stop and waited for a bus that never came... until RIGHT after we finally gave up and got in a taxi. We made it to the aforementioned "park", which was more like an abandoned, long-forgotten, slightly creepy overgrown field. We ended up finding a hole in a fence and making our escape that way... only to find ourselves smack in front of a shooting range. For reasons I'm still unclear about, we hung around there for a bit, having drinks and watching strangers try out their aim. Too loud, so we moved on. But not before finding great amusement in the "package deal" they were offering (see pic). Hmm, after a day at the shooting range, it's always so hard to choose between a soda or a lovely cup of herbal tea...

We finally found our way to the tribal museum.... which was closed for renovations. But you can't keep a good group down so we plodded on. I'm so glad we did as we then stumbled upon a long, charming row of thatched roof restaurants (what IS it about thatched roofs??) on the edge of a lake. We chose one and ended up spending a ridiculously long and lovely time there. Since this place was nowhere near the tourist sections of town, the menu was written strictly in Thai and the waiter didn't speak a single word of English. So we randomly pointed at some 'mystery items' on the menu and that was what we had for lunch. We still don't know what it was, but we do know that it was hot-hot-HOOOT.

When we got back into town, Sarah, Dani and I finally went for the pedicures that we have been talking about since about our second day here. Delightful. And let's just say that I tipped very generously as wearing flip-flops every day for 2 months straight is, well, a tad hard on the feet. Frankly, I should have paid her double.

And the rest of the evening we all spent hanging out in the lounge... while Sarah and I worked on changing our flights. Again. We were originally planning to leave Thailand on the 7th but after our first day in Bangkok knew we wanted more time here. So we pushed it back to the 14th, thinking then we would have a few days to spend at the beach after Chiang Mai. But once we got up here and met up with our cool new peeps, we couldn't drag ourselves away so we resigned ourselves to missing the beach in lieu of more time up here with The Gang. We were okay with our decision as we knew there would be more beaches in our future, but not another group like this.

And then tonight, as we were all talking about the idea of Sarah and I actually having to leave tomorrow (as we needed to get back to Bangkok to do some things there before flying now out), no one wanted to think of actually having to go our separate ways. Ideas started flying around and, long story short, we are now leaving Thailand on the 18th (which pushes everything else back, which meant changing ALL of our remaining flights). Sarah and I are still going to Bangkok tomorrow to take care of our stuff there but the The Group will follow a day later and then we'll all make our way down to the beach together. I'm starting to think we have some codependency issues but, hey, what's a little codependency when you're having so much fun? Plus, we get to go to the beach. In Thailand. Woo-hoo!