Bangkok!



Thailand!




Let's see - it's cleaner, calmer, and cooler than initially expected. Maybe India has jaded our traveler's eyes, but when we think "developing world" we expect to see garbage, animals, and beggars everywhere in the streets. However, so far during our brief wanderings about the city we haven't seen much of any of them. Once jetlag has left us alone a bit more we plan on being touristic, and perhaps that will slightly alter our opinion, but today we did ride the SkyTrain to go and check out our bikes. We finally met Fausto, the owner of Bike Zone, where we are purchasing our bikes from. He's a great guy, our bikes look fantastic, and he's even nicely storing some of our stuff for us while we are traveling around for the next two weeks!



Everyone has arrived, except Blaise who will be showing up Sunday night. This means we've been to the airport three times already, which isn't so bad since we can catch a bus direct to the airport from nearby our hotel. We are staying at Sukhumvit On Nut Guesthouse - the goofy name is due to the two main nearby streets. Don't worry, we haven't quite gotten over the fact that we're staying "ON NUT" either :-).

All the food we've had so far has been spectacular, lots of fresh vegetables and spices in every dish. Luke, as a vegetarian, is having to work a bit to get his preferred style of food, but that's primarily due to our inability to read the restaurant menus. Thai is a pretty, curvy script, but that doesn't really help when we're trying to decipher what has meat and what doesn't. Thankfully pointing, looking helpless, and taking a gamble has been successful so far.

We'll post more soon, but despite having done a minimum of adventuring, we are definitely so exhausted that going out on a Friday night doesn't even sound appealing...

Peace
A&E

Here's a post from earlier, you'll understand the delay once you read the first paragraph:

It's now Tuesday morning, and we're just settling into our full day of waiting at Beijing's airport. Big news here is that the government is quite actively blocking websites: we are stopped from accessing both Facebook and Blogger, and currently our attempts to get a proxy working are failing, so you may be reading this a while after its been written! Thankfully we depart for Bangkok this evening around 7pm, so we're only “censored” for a day – which is great except that we arrived here before 5am! Sometimes our thriftiness – in finding the cheapest voyage to Thailand - is only so beneficial...


Anyways, we just spent a fantastic weekend with the extended Muth clan, primarily hanging out in Redondo Beach, CA. We stayed at a Best Western only blocks from Hermosa Beach (where we spent a great morning body-surfing the waves), which was also about a mile from where our aunt & uncle live. Quality time was the top priority, since everyone only had the weekend to see each other, so we spent a lot of time chatting, eating, and drinking. Besides the beach visit, we also squeezed in a little hot-tub time, played an exciting game of family charades, and Liz even managed to hit up a yoga class. It was really nice to see everyone, aunts & uncles, cousins, and cousins' children alike :-).
We also visited our aunt & uncle on Anderson's mother's side, out in Northridge, so we ate some amazing Chinese food at the Mandarin Cafe and also petted their two Australian Shepherds, Renzo & Elle, as much as we possibly could.
Monday we spent cruising around LA with our friend Matt, having lunch at Venice Beach, exploring a bit of Long Beach (where he lives), and then returning to Redondo Beach for one last family get-together at Ruby's. After saying our final, final, final round of goodbyes, our cousin Reannon drove us the short distance to LAX, and to the beginning of our SE Asian Adventure...

Petrified Forest National Park

It's been a busy few days of road-travel, as we work our way across the American Southwest. This is being typed en route, actually, so currently we're in the desert between Flagstaff, AZ and Barstow, CA. We'll be staying in Barstow this evening, which is exciting mostly because the hotel has a pool in addition to the wi-fi!
Today is going to primarily be a travel day, not only because we need to cover a lot of miles, but also because most of the destinations are too far off of I-40 to visit when you're in a rush. That means we've decided against the Grand Canyon - four hours of driving for a few photo ops isn't quite worth it when one travels with their parents :-). Thankfully, yesterday involved more than enough touristic activities to satisfy even us!
We started our day, departing from Grants, NM, by taking scenic by-way 53 so we could stop by a place nicknamed "Fire & Ice." The "Fire" comes from the ancient Bandera Volcano - which we climbed - and the "Ice" comes from a perma-frozen cave-lake at the edge of a collapsed lava tube.


As you can see from the photos, the landscape was definitely dynamic and diverse. The volcano was quite impressive because we could see the path of the lava flow during our walk to the edge of the crater, while the ice-cave was literally freezing - a nice break from the desert heat - as we descended down into the cavern. Definitely a lucrative tourist trap for the family that owns it, but overall it was very interesting.
Next up was nearby El Morro National Monument, which features not only an impressive bluff with native American housing remains on the top of it, but also has quite the historical graffiti collection. Hundreds of signatures and drawings have been carved into the soft sandstone rock, ranging from Spanish explorers, to gold seekers, to early American travelers. There is a deep pool of water located at the base of the bluff, which certainly explained the site's popularity!



After our best meal yet, at the roadside Stagecoach Cafe in Ramah, we then drove a while to finish our tourists' trifecta with... the Petrified Forest National Park. Located in eastern Arizona, the park combines spectacular views of the painted desert, along with a plethora of petrified wood in its natural setting, and then throws in a few native American petroglyphs for good measure. Perhaps you can tell, but all three were impressive and very photogenic!



We spent last night in Winslow, Arizona - which if you're an Eagles fan you've undoubtedly heard of - though virtually all of our time there was spent either eating to recover from starvation, or sleeping to recover from exhaustion. Thankfully those conditions, from our modern perspective, are nothing like what it must have been like for those intrepid adventurers whose footsteps we are so loosely following.
Coming up is a weekend of family fun in and around Redondo Beach, CA, which will undoubtedly involve a bit of touristing - currently we're contemplating the Getty Museum in LA, and hopefully a winery on the way into the city - we shall see.

Crazy that we'll be in Bangkok in less than a week, and riding our bikes in about three...

Peace
A&E