Thailand, Here We Come!

Happy Friday everyone! 

It’s been the most gorgeous month of fall weather here in Portland, and so it’s kind of hard to believe that Christmas is only two months from today! Craziness. I’ve started narrowing down our Christmas card choices (but still am having a hard time deciding!) and will likely start listening to Christmas music come next week (after Halloween is totally acceptable in my mind). So that’s why I thought it would be the perfect time to go ahead and share where we’ll be spending the holidays this year…

We are going to THAILAND!

(In case you didn’t already get that from the title of this post…ha)

source

We are SO excited about this trip, so I’m glad I can finally share the news!

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you’d know that travel is something Cameron and I are really passionate about. One of my goals for this fall was to start planning our next international trip; Thailand was definitely a place that was very high on our list of places to go, however, we weren’t quite sure when we would have time to take a more extended vacation with Cam having just changed jobs. Now that we’ve had a few months to get settled into life in Oregon, we were trying to figure out our plans for the holidays and how best to share time with both of our families. Since moving to Oregon this summer, we’ve been able to see a lot more of Cam’s family on a regular basis (which has been great!) and so we decided to go to Michigan to see my family over Thanksgiving. Cameron and I both get quite a bit of time off of work over Christmas this year, so we figured that it would be the perfect chance for us to take this vacation to Thailand that we had been talking about!

source
As much as I love Christmas and will miss spending it with family this year, I am super excited to go on this trip (and plan on squeezing in as much holiday fun as possible before we leave). We figured that this may likely be the last year where we can just peace out over the holidays and take a vacation like this, and so we wanted to do it while we can! While I can’t say for certain what next year will bring, there is a good chance that 2014 may include some big things like potentially buying a house and starting a family, which would definitely make it tougher to take a trip like this next year 🙂
source

We just booked our plane tickets for this trip very recently, and so now we are on a little bit of a time crunch to plan out our itinerary and make reservations! We will be flying to Thailand on Saturday Dec. 21st and then flying home on Wednesday January 1st; it’s quite a long flight, but we’re hoping to experience as much of Thailand as we can in the time that we’re there. We are flying in and out of Bangkok and plan to spend some time seeing the city, but we’re not 100% sure about what other places we want to go. We will most likely travel north to Chiang Mai and would like to spend some time on the beaches as well, but we are really open to advice on where we should go at this point in the planning process! I’ve already emailed a few different bloggers/friends who I know have traveled to Thailand, but I’d love to get as much input as possible–if you have any info you can share with me about what we should do, where we should go, where we should eat (obviously important–ha!), what we should see, or where we should stay, I would love love love to hear them so please shoot me an email!

Also, two things that I know for sure that I want to do while we’re in Thailand are 1.) Take a Thai cooking class and 2.) Visit an elephant sanctuary to spend a day riding/caring for elephants, so recommendations for places/companies to do either of those activities would be especially helpful!

source

Have a great weekend everyone and thanks in advance to anyone who sends me Thailand info!

Follow: