Day 1 (Monday):

Really long set of flights here through Tokyo. Then picked up rental car (had to stand in line behind some idiot who had not brought a map or GPS with him - just a set of google maps - who was trying to ask the rental car guy how to get to his resort and complaining about the poor quality of the rental car maps and warning me not to use them.....I said we had GPS and a road atlas, and he could alway rent a GPS from Avis. He was worried about us and asked how we were getting all the way to our hotel, which was 10 hours from Bangkok (his was 4). I said we've been all over the world, don't worry. He said so had he (to which I was thinking...yeah, but you obviously still have problems getting around....). So hopefully HE made it to his resort. I was sort of worried about him, y'know....

So, VERY long drive down the coast (and Greg drove all the way by himself!!). We stopped for breakfast alongside the road here:

Good food, only cost us $7 for all 3 of us. Noone but locals eating there (of course, they did not speak English).

Continued on, and stopped to look at the beautiful limestone mountains (caves everywhere!) bout 1 hour NE of our resort (Gerry and Yong, I'll try and get some karst samples for you, but it's a national park, so hopefully I won't be arrested. The mountains are really steep - this photo is from farther away:

Arrived at hotel. Hotel is REALLY nice - so nice that breakfast costs $20 (because we paid with points, we don't get free breakfast like everyone else - although Julie does get free breakfast because we had to pay for her rollaway, which includes breakfast). So Greg and I are eating all the strange fruit we bought along the way (dragonfruit, giant citruses, and some small prickly thing that tastes like brandy).

Drove down the coast about 10 minutes to get to market and see the Thai navy ship that was driven about 2km inland during the tsunami. Below are abandoned houses that haven't been rebuilt yet about 1km from the coast.

Most of the stuff is all new here - redone after the tsunami. So then we went to the market - had vegetables, fruit, clothes, junk and just about every kind of cooked thing on a stick you can imagine. I had large squid on a stick with spicy sauce and some kind of chicken ball thing. July tried pork and rice sausage on a stick, but reported it ws mostly rice and so fed it to a dog....

Went to dinner (squid not very filling) at a restaurant on a cliff overlooking the bay. Let me just say that Thai food here is much more spicy than in the USA, so we had to keep adding rice to our stuf to be able to eat it easily.....or in Greg's case, he just drank more beer with it!

Late report from early in the morning, day 2: Never plug a 110V power strip into a 220 outlet, even if the plug fits, and definitely do not do this in the middle of the night when the resounding POW and burning smell will wake everyone up. This is especially unadvised, and unneeded when all electronics you own are made in Japan and can take 110 or 220 anyway......