riverECHO

After a three hour nap following our all night quarterly meeting for Vertical Media, we rented a scooter for $6/day and gave ourselves a self guided tour of Phuket. Scooters are definitely the main mode of transportation around here and although almost 90% of the people we saw on scooters were tourists as well, we couldn’t help but feel a little more connected to the cultural side of Thailand. It was such a fun day and such a great way to see the island. We ripped around the skinny roads, stopped at a few overlooks, followed the big red signs up to the Big Buddha, had lunch along the ocean front, and even got pulled over by the cops. Apparently they are always on the look out for people driving without a license and luckily BJ just happened to bring his passport and license along for the ride.  There don’t seem to be too many other rules on the road. Only half of the people on scooters actually wear helmets . . . we had two really snazzy looking blue ones. You can ride three scooters to a lane if needed. And more than a couple times we were confronted with a scooter driving towards us in our shoulder lane. I’m pretty sure just about any other scooter key could have started ours up as well and although we didn’t put our theory to test, people seem pretty trustworthy. We especially enjoyed passing the scooters that had a side car which had been converted to a food stand on wheels. I’m bummed we missed a photo of one in particular that was actually cooking some satay chicken sticks over coals while driving.

We headed back out on the scooter in the evening to have dinner in Kata, one beach south of Karon. We had a table overlooking the main downtown street which provided us with a great view for people watching. On the way back we took a “scenic route” and saw another side of Thailand in the area’s red light district. We barely needed a headlight on our scooter because the neon lights lit our way. Still exhausted from the all nighter and a fun day on the scooter, we came home early and went straight to bed.

But apparently we didn’t get enough and we were back on the road for lunch again today. We spent the afternoon catching up on work while overlooking the ocean from our hotel balcony and we are looking forward to Brandon and Jen’s arrival this evening. They will join us at our hotel tonight and head out with us via boat first thing tomorrow to Phi Phi Island and on to the low key Railay Beach.

We heard some sad news yesterday. One of Jean’s puppies, 14 year old Barkley (on the right in the photo), was being put down. Barkley was one of the many critters that Jean so lovingly took home from a kill shelter. She lost Sundance, another retriever, just under a year ago. Needless to say it has been a tough year for her. But she still has two little guys at home, Salsa-the-crazy-black-cat and Scooter-the-crazy-terrier. Barkley played the middle man between the two before and although his best friend was Scooter, he had befriended (or tolerated) Salsa as well. Now it’s up to Salsa and Scooter to hash it out and start snuggling. Jean, we are thinking about you and very sorry about your loss. We know how much Barkley meant to you.

BJ woke up at 4am yesterday (8am in Jackson, Wyoming) to meet over Skype with Vertical Media. When I finally zombied out of bed he was already half way through his work day. His meetings went great and the solid internet connection that we have make us more optimistic about being able to work from just about anywhere. We spent the late afternoon watching people kite surf on the beach and then reading, eating fine cheese, drinking German beer, and listening to the birds sing on our deck next to our koi fish pond.

We’ve cooked the last two meals at “home” and it has been a nice surprise to go into the local grocery store and find much more than just meat pies, kebab, and vegemite (what BJ feared would consume our diets down under). After dinner we took a walk around the neighborhood. We stopped and smelled roses, honeysuckle, and lilies in front of a few different houses and tried to remember the last time we had “stopped and smelled the flowers.”

We find ourselves in a unique situation. We actually have the chance to test out a few places and decide if and where we want to stay during our 6 months in New Zealand. We like Nelson, but what if we like Wanaka or Queenstown or Dunedin more? For this week, at least, we are calling Nelson home and looking forward to enjoying the artsy and active community that lives here.

BJ, Jean, her two dogs Barkley and Scooter, and I loaded the car and began our drive to Taos, NM at 5:30am on Saturday morning. We had over 14 hours to drive and we wanted to arrive to our rental Airstream Trailer (more on that later) with enough time to enjoy a good soak in the hot tub. But just south of Jackson as the sun began to rise behind the cloudy skies, it began to snow and the number of cars that were already off the road started to increase as we headed further south. We quickly realized that our 14 hour drive may take longer than expected. BJ and I took turns fighting the wind and rain that was at our back for the entire drive until we hit a monsoon and lightning in El Raton in northern New Mexico at around 8pm and decided to get a hotel room for the night. We didn’t realize we had turned off at the Taos exit because all the highway signs had been blown down and as Jean put it, “those are bad signs,” no pun intended. So we called it a night and found a clean hotel room in Raton for the night.

After our fix of cable tv, continental breakfast, and weak coffee, we loaded the doggies and pointed the car west to Taos, just a short 2 hour drive. Taos greeted us with cloudy but warm skies, more galleries than we could count, and many small pot-holed side streets that made us feel like we were truely in Mexico. We followed our directions out of town and down a long dirt road to arrive at, by far, the quaintest accommodation in Taos–our very own Airstream trailer, complete with patio, grill, hot tub, and of course, the World Wide Web. It’s cozy with the 5 of us, but we’re excited to call it home for the week. We lunched in town at an Italian restaurant (I know, I know, we were looking for chile rellenos), and then quickly came back home to relax and read our stack of New Mexico travel guides. We have a small list of must-sees this week like the Taos Pueblo, the High Road to Santa Fe, eating lots of chile rellenos, and, most importantly, RELAXING at our house in Taos.