Ready to go again!

 First words from Cindy--

We are once again almost ready to take off. We invite you to sit back in your armchair and travel with us. We've rented an apartment in Hua Hin, Thailand for two weeks. Next we'll spend three weeks in Laos. Ever since I read Colin Cotterill's series with Dr. Siri Paiboun a forensic pathologist who is both brilliant and inhabited by spirits, I have wanted to visit Laos.

In this blog I want to let you know a bit about the planning. Once again our patient travel agent Debbie (disom@travlead.com) has found us places to stay and places for us to go. She has also arranged our flights and transportation once we knew where we wanted to go. Now all I have to do is keep AM & PM straight. 

For this trip we shopped for travel insurance and found that InsureMyTrip.com had good coverage for a reasonable price. The best way to get the insurance, if you need it, is to call them. Then when the paperwork is emailed to you do not change any answers that the agent has completed for you or the price goes up. Just call them back and it will be corrected. It seems I learn everything by trial and error.

Even with a travel agent it takes many hours to prepare for a trip of this kind. We do most of the planning as opposed to a guided tour or a cruise. Where will we stay? How long will we stay? What will we do? Once we know that, Debbie can set up flights, hotels, tours but at each step she has to get back to us so that we can decide among the options. We usually travel for a month, perhaps, two. And we have a budget that is not to exceed what it would cost us to stay in Florida or Arizona for the same amount of time. Included in this budget are premium economy airfares.

Before we go I create a mixed media art book that I will add to as we travel. I do the backgrounds for the pages based on classes I have taken from Joan Fullerton (www.joanfullerton.com) and Laura Lein-Svencner (https://www.lauralein-svencner.com).

Top: a few middle pages

Bottom: first page and last page

Our trip ends in Tokyo where it will be in the 40's and 50's. Packing was a challenge as we needed to pack for five weeks of summer and one week of a mild winter. Thank you to whomever invented packable down jackets.

The last word from Dennis--

My turn to write a little bit. The prep for this trip has fallen entirely on Cindy's shoulders. My inadequate contribution has been moral support. I've been constantly reinforcing her with "you can do it" and "I don't want to slow you down so I'll just stay out of your way." I guess you could say I contributed nothing considering she probably spent about 100 hours on the keyboard arranging things. I've always felt it extremely important to know my own short comings. 😕

So this is it for now. I'm using this to help prepare myself for the next six weeks of hearing, " haven't you written anything for the blog yet?" Or "Can't you just sit down for 14 minutes and write something for the blog?" Yep...I know it's coming.