Archive for December 16th, 2011

Justin had planned an awesome elephant adventure for my birthday, but since it started the day after my actual birthday we needed something to do on the day.  The solution was to do another Thai cooking class!  This time in Chiang Mai, a town in northern Thailand.  We found one that looked good on the internet and would highly recommend it as the class and the food was AMAZING!  The school is Thai Farm Cooking School.

Choosing our recipes to learn

They had a great system – they picked us up in the morning and handed out menu selection paper.  We each got to select five courses and each course had three choices of dish to cook.  We tried to pick different dishes so that we would have the widest selection we could make in the future.

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While we were in Vietnam, Hazel had a realization – we weren’t having that much fun anymore!

You can think whatever you want, but it turns out that after 9 months being a tourist just isn’t that easy to do.  You start to want to just hole up in a single place, do nothing, see nothing, and relax.  Hazel, being an excellent problem solver, came up with a solution to our problems – we’d just plan every day to the end of the trip, and that way we would have all the great bits about being travelling (seeing other cultures and landscapes, experiencing food and drink traditions, etc) without all the work.  So the goal was to have plans set for the remaining 77 days of our trip.

Organized!

It turns out that planning 77 days is no picnic!  To get organized, we do what we always do – make a Google Doc!  We have a spreadsheet where each row is a day and it details where we’re sleeping, what we’re doing, and how we’re travelling if we have any plans.  Days where the accommodation is not figured out are marked in red, and successful days we’ve already had get marked in green.  At first we had a lot of red, so Hazel and I each picked one big idea, and worked our hardest to make it happen.  I wanted to scuba dive at another world-class location, and Hazel chose to walk the Overland Track in Tasmania.

Figuring this out was great for us.  We saw exactly how it would happen, and even figured out how to make it to the Melbourne Lindy Exchange in Australia after going on the track.  So we rang up Qantas and changed our flights around to give us a lot more time in Oz, a lot less time in Thailand, and a lot more time in Singapore.  Though it took forever to get booked, we ended up with a schedule that we knew would work and could concentrate on doing stuff we wanted to do instead of stuff we thought we ought to do. Sweet As!