I haven't ventured out of the US for two years (except for a 24hour jaunt over the northern border to Toronto last December), but soon I'm off again on my longest plane trip yet. And unless I ever go to New Zealand, it may be my longest ever.
Last Wednesday evening my boss emailed me from his vacation to ask if I'd be available to travel to Bangkok for a week's worth of meetings with a Thai bank, which I probably cannot legally name, so I won't. I immediately started sending emails to see if I could get kid-coverage for a week and checking airlines for fares. With less than 2 weeks notice, Delta was charging an outrageous $6000.00 for the privilege of sitting in the cattle-car known as Coach-class for 22 hours. So we pushed the dates of the meeting by a week, kept $4000.00 in the S1 coffers and away from Delta Airlines, and my boss told me to "Fire up the blog!" Since I ALWAYS do what I'm told, here we go...
I'll be in Bangkok for a weekend before the meetings start, so I should be able to see some of the city. I've been advised to hire an interpreter and a driver to take me around on a sight-seeing tour on Saturday at least. And I've been advised to not, under any circumstances, allow a tuk-tuk driver to take me on the highways. Local roads only!
The current adventure involves getting a visa (which is not required for travel from Europe) in time to get on an airplane next week. International travel always seems to involve some time-critical piece of missing data... in this case a Letter of Invitation from the requesting company in Thailand. I'm hoping to have that Letter sitting on my fax machine in the morning, so I can package up all my vital documents and overnight them to the visa folks, who promise (but don't guarantee) I'll have my passport back in my hands by next Thursday morning. We shall see.
In the meantime, I need to start making a list...
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