There is No Pie in Pia

The next leg of our adveture we dove head first into Pia. and it has been a delicious experience. the little town in northern Thailand is loaded with hippies, Art and more then enough scooters to go around. We meet a great Australian Couple in Chaing Mai and we tagged along with them up here. We have had so much fun things to do we have not relaxed at all. The craziest thing about Pia is the Weather, it goes from above 30 during the day to around  5 through the night. i know being from Canada we should have thick skin and really plus 5 is water ski weather, but its diffrent in Thailand.

This is the place we are staying in, its a great little bungalow with a walk in closet and its own jacuzzi... only down fall, its not well insulated, it gets dang cold at night.

 This is the suspension bridge we have to cross to get to our house. its a little rickety

 These are our new friends, Rhys and Cheryse, we are at Pia cannyon it had some sweet cliffs.

 Jess in Pia, that would be a yummy Pie.

 We hiked to some waterfalls and along the way came across some crazy cliffs, you can not see it but underneath them it drops about 100 feet.

 these are the water falls, there were about 5 different sections of falls as you hiked up that were very cool, Ben was the only one brave enough to get in... it was cold.

 on the way back from the falls we stopped at the strangest little place. it was a view point with really cool swinging egg chairs.

 This is the greatest invention of all time, when we get home ben is going to make one... it is a ferris wheel swing, we got all four of us on it and it got a little dangerous to say the least.

This is our biker gang the Screaming Panda's, we don't even give a care about the Fuzz. To get to all of our activities we rented scooters for a few days. it was SOOO FUN. We Tore those roads up. We ride together, we Die Together, Screaming Panda's fo Life.

This one was one of our stops along the way, its a natural hot spring. a little to hot to bath in, but perfect temperature for boiling eggs.

"Hill Tribes" of Chaing Mai

We are now in the great northern city of Chaing Mai, our favorite place thus far. we found a nice little guest house to stay at called joker brothers guest house. After a day of rest to get over our jet lag we got our feet back on the ground with an amazing 1 hour Thai massage for a measly 5 bucks, lets just say massages have become a regular thing since.

 We have been mostly eating at stands on the streets for at most a dollar, and neither of us have been sick , yet... but it sure is scrumchy.

 There is a variety of food here, eating one thousand year old horse pee is not one of the delicacies we have ventured to try yet.

 there are Buddhist temples all over the place, Jessica was recruited to be one of the statues.

 we rented bikes and went for a bike ride around the city, you are definitely taking a risk being on any sort of transportation in this city. we found this really big tree, its cool.

 This was a sign at one of the temples. there were a bunch of dogs there but none of them seemed to bark. every body and there Dog has a Dog around here.

As we were going to get some dinner we ran in to a guy we worked with at Liberty, that was weird. this is rory talk about a small world.
Our second day in Chaing Mai we went on a 3 day 2 night trek.

 it started with an orchid and butterfly farm. i only saw 2 butterflies... i saw more in the city then in the "farm"

 then it as of two the long neck Zoo... i mean village, they tried to see how many rings they could get on jessica.

 Not as many as this funny old lady playing the ukulele.

 they start them young, i told her yo give me a smile, this is what she came up with.

 This lady on the other hand had quite the smile. this village felt like the people were just on display trying to sell us stuff.

 our trek group, from all over the world. norway brazil england, isreal and australia.

 We had a 4 hour hike the first day, this was a nice cave on the way.

 our guest house for the night, got very chilly, but we had nets so the bugs didn't bite.

 We played football with the kids in the village, it was for sure the highlight of my trip so far.

 The little boy to the left of me is Baht, that means money in thai. we became friends very quick.

 they have 7-Eleven all over the place, even in the villages, they didnt have the regular super big  gulps though.

 the next day we went on a elepant ride trough the jungle and down a river, it was SOO cool. jessicas favorite part.

 after we floated down the river on some bamboo.

the next morning we went to some waterfalls, it was nice to get out of the heat and into some water.

Our first 5 days

Finally off to Thailand, or so we thought. We started early saturday morning (jan 14) with a flight to LA and ended early this morning( Jan 18) to end up at our preferred destination of Chaing Mai. After sprinting through  LAX to get to Tokyo we found ourselves waiting in lines for hours to undoubtedly miss our flight to Bangkok. This left us stranded in Tokyo all night untill late the next night when we could get another flight out. 

We were so sad and exhausted from our 16 hours worth of travel that we didn't know what to do. We contemplated just sleeping in the airport, but the Japanese didn't seem to like that idea. So we booked a hotel room. for a hundred and 5 bucks a night or 8000 Yen

And we didn't even get to snuggle... I was sad, but too tired to do anything about it. The next day we decided to go to the airport early after experiencing the Japanese culture at a local convenience store. 

cough syrup with a provocative anime on it. 

we got the airport at 1 PM to be sure we didn't miss our flight at 630. We were taking no chances. 

During the wait we got a bite to eat. Lucky for us, we got to choose from a copious amount of plastic entrees. 

They all looked so yummy, it took an hour for us to decide (At least). we also had the McDonalds option of an All American Meal 

Can't say I've ever seen that back home. Mind you, we are in Canada

After a long flight we made it to Bangkok around midnight their time. As we stood in line to get a taxi a funny little man with a braided beard from Germany ask if we wanted to share a taxi with him. He couldn't stop talking about all of his adventures, his girlfriend in Taiwan , and his unsanitary tattoos that went from neck to ankle.  We wondered the streets till 2 am with him until we found a hostel that wasn't full. 

We didn't really get a good taste for Bangkok so we wanted to leave as soon as possible. But we need to get a visa in order to go to Vietnam later in our trip. We wondered the streets of Bangkok all day waiting for our visa to be done. Here are some of our adventures from eating on the side of the road to working out in the park. 

After taking care of all of our visa stuff. we finally made it to the bus terminal after 3 hours of walking around looking for it and asking people where it might be. We finally gave in a got a taxi ride to the Bus terminal. He didn't speak english and at one point ben and I thought he was taking us around in circles. But in the end he got us to our destination. 

We took a double Decker bus to Chiang Mai which took ten hours. it was ok though because it was all purple and fancy 

We got to Chaing Mai at 5 am this morning and still don't have a place to stay, but that's our next adventure!

Mexico 2012

Ben and I got to go  to Mexico this year for a work trip. It was a blast! In the sun for a whole week, we got  to hang out with so many fun couples. It was a great start to our traveling adventures.

We stayed at an all inclusive resort just outside of Cancun called The Sunset Princess Rivera, or something like that. It was fantastic, all the free alcohol and food you could ever want! I have never been to anything like it. It was very well kept, there were workers scrubbing the sidewalks, railings or sculptures every day! There was a tone of dancing, music and performances so that we always had something to do when the sun wasn't up.

Our first day was all fun in the sun, volleyball, kayaking swimming and tanning. It was a bit overcast, but still very warm.
Day number 2 was kind of a lazy day for me. I had to finish up some grad school applications and Ben and the boys played some football. That night we went to the Disco Tech for some dancing. It was really fun, our group definitely brought the party.

Day 3 was one of my favorite days. We went to some local ruins (and hour and a half away). They were all really cool and thought provoking about the BOM. Most of the ruins were pretty far apart, we had to run for the last 15mins to make sure we didn't miss the bus. or at least I ran. We also went to the Cenotes, underwater caves. that was definitely my favorite part. 

Day 4 it was sunday and we went to church. It was very packed in the chapel. Ben and I couldn't really understand what was going on during sacrament so we decided to go out in the hall and give our seats to someone who could understand. It was a good move because a missionary then pulled us into another room and translated the meeting into english for us! yay! there were a lot of us that day

We all wore flip flops to church... its all we had. we also went to the markets that day. yikes. in our defense we had to walk through them to get to church.

Day 5 was a nice relaxing day on the beach. It turned out to be the hottest day we were there. I got burned to say the least. but it was a blast! We also went our for dinner at some of the restaurants at the resort. It was great because they were all FREE!!

day 6 was also really fun. We went to Explorer, a zip lining crazy adventure. There were 2-45min zip lining routes that went over the jungle, crocodiles, Jaguars, and we went through water falls and into underwater caves. it was really fun. We also got to go ATVing through the jungle, it was awesome! ben is a bit of a crazy driver! he definitely crashed into the Frasers (James and Angela).

  Day 7 was our last day. We actually made the most of it. played water polo, volley ball, went swiming and ate as much as we could at the buffet.

Mexico 2012 was amazing! We got to hang out with awesome people, make new friends and reunite with old ones. It makes me wish that we could take all of our friends with us to Thailand.

Bens birthday breakfast

I decided I wanted to make Ben's birthday special this year and give him a bit of a surprise. But instead of the typical surprise birthday party, I had everyone arrive at the house while Ben was still in bed! He had no idea, It was awesome! It was nice to separate Ben's birthday from new years. I think we will make Ben's Birthday Breakfast an annual thing! Maybe our first family tradition!