Written at 10:30 am, Monday morning (Jan 21^st).

I’m not sure when I’ll get to post this, but I thought I would take advantage of a few quiet moments and write a quick update….

We’re here in Chiang Mai. One flight journeys seem SO EASY!! Our total travel time was about 6 hours. 6 hours!! We have a 6 hour lay-over in Chicago almost every trip back to the US. The only very minor snag was that the airline had an infant meal for Julianna, not a child’s meal. I saved the baby food jars for Emma Grace, and Julianna ate the rice from my meal. A few granola bars supplemented her fare. Not the healthiest meal she’s ever eaten, but hey... she wasn’t hungry when she finished, so it was a success in my book.

But, once we got to the hotel, things got a bit complicated. [side note here… we took an open back pick up truck taxi type thing from the airport – they are super popular and convenient modes of transportation in Thailand. We got all settled in the truck (did I mention that we are traveling with Matt’s mountain bike? more on that later..) and Julianna looked up at me and said, “Ju-nanna in Thailand, go ride ELEPHANT!!” ]

Anyways, back to the hotel. We had requested two adjoining rooms, but knew that our chances were slim – there are a LOT of families here, so there weren’t enough adjoining rooms to go around. We brought the monitors, and figured we’d settle for two side-by-side rooms. Our two rooms?? 4027 and 2015. Hmmm. Now, that’s not going to work quite like we were expecting.

Seeing as how it was almost 10pm and the girls were ready to crash, Matt dropped me and the girls off in 4027 and went to see what he could do. Made a pallet for Julianna on the floor (with the extra bedding from room 2015), and set up the little tent that Lydia sleeps in. Julianna was disappointed she wasn’t going to sleep on the big king bed, but was too tired to argue. Lydia slept (initially, but had a rough night).

We did notice that 4027 was capable of connecting to either neighboring room, so I fell asleep praying that God would work a miracle and one of our neighboring rooms would open up. Well, our neighbors in 4025 left early this morning. Julianna went to childcare, Matt to the meeting, and Lydia has slept for the past 90 minutes while I’ve unpacked (we’re here for two weeks!). We’ve got a great set-up and praise God for the adjoining room!!

Lydia’s waking up now, so I gotta run. I’ll be back later to fill you in on details re: traveling with a mountain bike.

Ok, so it's later... a lot later. Tuesday afternoon. No time now, but i did get a chance to post once. I'll be back soon.

Laura