It’s two and half years later and I’m back. Only this time it’s with my partner in crime, Rozie. Our journey here was long (29 hours of total travel from the Seattle house to Chiang Mai) but surprisingly comfortable. That is, if you don’t include the six months of preparation it took to facilitate a smooth journey – that was pretty brutal since it mostly piled into the last week! For those of you who were wondering, yes, we did finish the backyard fence complete with gate, but despite Casey's help, we had to leave the dog door issue to a professional after our second try.

[You may notice the tense changing in this blog. We’re both writing -- and brutally editing each others’ writing. We’re fairly interchangeable (having the same given name and all) but occasionally even we may get confused as to who’s writing.]

Our trip really started with a jaunt to Arizona in early October to visit some kin. Rozie had yet to meet K’s dear friend Matthew, who met us in Tucson. And R wanted to see her Uncle Allan and Aunt Boonmee in Prescott. Boonmee hails from Kalasin province, southeast of Chiang Mai, and Allan lived in Thailand for about two decades. (In fact, we're now living across the street from Chiang Mai's Rincome Hotel, where they got married.) While we toured Allan & Boonmee’s well-loved desert haunts, we also learned a lot about Boonmee’s life in Thailand and Allan’s adventures abroad. We hope to meet up with some of Boonmee’s other nieces when we venture outside of Chiang Mai.

Elizabeth met us in Bangkok just in the nick of time to make the flight to Chiang Mai. K was disappointed with the new ultra-modern Bangkok airport because it now seemed like so many others we've been in lately, but at least it had an appropriately extravagant spirit house to keep the spirits from causing mischief inside. (A ubiquitous Thai tradition.)

Our pets are safely home with Jamie, but luckily for us, Norman, Elizabeth’s small, talkative, black cat is here to keep us four-footed, furry company, so we feel right at home.

Lizzie is once again providing excellent hosting support, complete with the standard (making sure we are comfortably housed and fed) and with more than standard hostessing… driving three on a motor bike, helmetless through rush hour traffic. (Don't worry, it was a one-time, initiation kind of thing, now that we've rented our own bike we'll be legally helmeted.) And on our second night a ukulele jam session with Lizzie's ex-pat friends. It was quite an international gathering – Marissa is full Thai but from the US and is here doing public health research for Johns Hopkins; her German fiancée is in Argentina removing transmitter backpacks from swallows. Katlin from Australia runs a music program for youth, and Corinna is a Peruvian who hails from Germany, but has been here for 20 years and speaks 5 languages. And there we were, playing Hawaiian ukelele’s in Thailand! Who knew that Britney Spears could sound so good on ukeleles? (Did we mention we’re going through culture shock?)