Vacation Recipe

Posted under Thailand 2008

Recipe for a perfect vacation. Take almost constant sunshine, miles of white sand beaches, clear water and friendly people — now add to that mix some family to share with and it just doesn’t get much better than this. It seems as though the boys just arrived and now it is nearly time for them to leave. We did have a lot of fun.

The boys arrived at Karon beach about 12:45 in the dark of night. Now the beauty of having company is that it gives Bonnie a reason to plan things to death, followed immediately by a reason to worry yourself sick that the planning was less than perfect and everyone wouldn’t be totally thrilled. Such was the case with the rooms we had arranged for in Karon, and we ended up changing in mid stream. That, in itself, would not be much of a problem other than this middle of the night arrival. As the boys had already left Seattle by the time we made this change, we had no way of letting them know, and having them bashing on the door of a place where we were not guests seemed in poor form. We elected to stand on the street and wait. Now this was the night of a downpour and although it was prior to our sojourn, had little effect on us, it did curtail the street activity earlier than usual. All is well that ends well and indeed we did meet the lads and were able to lead them to their new digs.

It really is a small world. Took a scoot up to Bang Tao beach area to see a longtime family friend. Kevin Haglof was just wrapping up a business tour, and we got to spend an afternoon with him. He and Troy have been close since school days in good old Dawson Creek. In fact, both families have been pretty tight so it was really great to have this time. Kevin and his family now live in California and we got to hear about his growing family as well. Got to reminisce over a few “wobbly pops”, and time just flew. Imagine, you have to travel half way around the world for that moment in time when paths will cross with the past. Too weird.

Took the night tour into Patong under the guise of a change in dinner menu. Does seem to have the market on night activity in the beach area. They close off some of the streets to traffic and it becomes a sort of a giant mall. You can buy copies of almost any brand name item you might fancy, and some of it might even hold together long enough to get it home, but the beauty is you can haggle to your hearts content. Serious haggling must be very thirsty work, as along with all these stores nearly every second place is a watering hole of some sort. Now one would think that this sort of night activity would mostly involve the younger set, but no, there were numerous old gaffers with their young lady guides. In fact, there were spare guides lined up in the streets (mostly in front of the aforementioned watering holes). It seemed that there were so many of these good Samaritan ladies, prepared to look after the old and infirm, that there weren’t sufficient young ladies left to participate in some type of dance review. However, the show must go on and they managed to fill the spots with young fellows dressed like girlies. Uncertain as to how much of this wild night life we wished to expose our children to, we taxied back to the quiet of Karon.

Off to Phuket town for some much needed shopping. Bonnie suffers too severely from withdrawal pains if she is deprived for too many days. She managed to find a silk bed cover she had been looking for all over Thailand. Now when we were in Chiang Mai, we went through a facility that told us all about the manufacture of silk. How the silkworms are raised until the cocoons are formed. The cocoons are then boiled and unwound and the approximately 5 kilometers of ultra fine silk is separated. This is then spun into usable thread, dyed, and woven into cloth. Truly amazing, but the part that really puzzles me is, how did this all start? Picture this — “Hey dude, look at all these cocoons man. I bet if we could cook these little critters, they’d make a great snack.” “Well gnarly, just toss some in this boiling water, dude. I was just about to make some organic tea” “Hey man, just look, if I grab this itty bitty string, I can unwind this sleeping bag like a spool of thread.” “Outta sight dude — hey take a hit of this man, look at all that colour. You know, if we dyed this string these rainbow colours we could make some brilliant pantaloons for the fat man at the temple.” Maybe not exactly like that, but I ask you — who has enough time on their hands to find the starting end of a cocoon?

The ferry ride is next, but that is another day.
TTFN (ta-ta for now)
T