If you have clicked on the Coming Soon box you will know that my next trip is to Thailand in October/November with a good friend of mine, Cass.  You’ll met her at some point hopefully before we go since one of her tasks is to post something in the Journal.

That really is as far as the planing for the trip has gone.  Other than we will fly in and out of Bangkok.  We will spend most of our time up north.  At least a couple of days on an island or a beach type area, well it is Thailand, one kind of has to spend some time near the beach.

Ok so perhaps I shouldn’t get frustrated by the price of airfares in Australia. Maybe I should be used to it. After all it has always been this way in Australia.

What am I talking about you ask?

Domestic airfares. Or at least the price of them. I jumped online the other day checking out the various websites of different airlines. Yes I know there are search engines that will supposedly pull up the best airfare but quite frankly I’ve found them to be a joke. I haven’t really found that they do pull up the best fare and for the most part they seem to have a bias to a particular airline. So while I do test them out every now and then to see if they have gotten any better I tend to find that going direct to the airlines own website is cheaper. If a somewhat more lengthy process.

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Ok so finally this week I’ve been able to start booking things for the trip to Thailand.  The airfares, of course, came first both domestic and international.  They are booked and paid for!

We went with Thai International.  I’ve never flown with them before so it will be interesting to see what they are like, still I’ve heard nothing but praise for Thai.  I’ll be flying from here to Perth first up and spending time with family waiting for my travel buddies leave to start.  My leave starts about a week before hers!

Then on Tuesday 16 October 2007 we fly from Perth to Bangkok.

That is where the journey will begin.  That is where the journey will end.

I’m not sure why but somehow a trip just does not seem real until I’ve booked my airfare.  Once that happens I finally start to really believe that I am going.  The excitement starts to build or perhaps its just anticipation.

In typical fashion I really do not know what we will do in country.  The first couple of nights will probably be at the Shangri-La.  That will probably be booked by the end of next week.  After those ‘nice’ nights we will head up North, most likely.  There will be that ‘travel stuff’ of some description thrown in before heading back to Bangkok to fly out.  Well Cass will fly out Thursday 8 October, I’ll wave goodbye and stay an extra week or so.  I’m not sure if I’ll stay in Thailand or perhaps go to Myanmar the last week just for a brief ‘look’ at the country.  I figured the choice was to either head home and twiddle my thumbs for a week and a half there before starting work or stay longer in Thailand.

I chose to stay longer in Thailand!

The counter on my dashboard reliably informs me that it is 40 days 14 hours and 33 minutes until I’m ‘out of here’.

Things seem to be coming together quite nicely.  We’ve booked our ‘nice’ nights in Bangkok at the Shangri-La hotel and the price includes an airport pick-up.  Two nights of luxury before we head off to explore the country and stay in places that will not be quite as luxurious.  Still in there own way they will be better!

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This is kinda cool.

At least I think so.  Are you like me?
Are you the person who constantly hears friends and acquaintances regal you with the tails of how/when they were upgraded?  Have you noticed that those types always seem to have more than one story of when/how they were upgraded?  You sit there, just like I do and wish, just once, that it was you that managed to get upgraded.

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