Like most people, our past few years have been filled with turmoil, stress and uncertainty… a pandemic sure makes you reconsider life choices. Spending time in Canada allowed us to see family and friends, get some things sorted and the van sold. Our last few days in Calgary were filled with visits with my Mom, cleaning the apartment, a trip to the storage unit with John C. and packing for Thailand.

While in Thailand, we had made the huge decision to go back to Canada for the summer and sell the van. We had a pretty decent flight: BKK-NRT-YVR-YWG. Paul had used our eUpgrades with Air Canada to change an economy flight to business class via the latitude-attitude technique. Since the first leg from BKK-NRT was on ANA we were in economy but the next 3 flights were all AC business class.

For those of you that have followed our story, you know that we came back to Canada in Spring 2020 due to the uncertainty of covid. We had purchased a van thinking it would be a great time to get started on building our van life plan. Unfortunately it wasn’t, life happened, and we needed to make a change. With not having a home base, we had been dependent on family for places to stay, parking the van and storing boxes of our stuff.

Well, here we go again… same, same but different! Several friends had gotten in touch and were all planning on heading to Lipe for February and March. We hadn’t seen Bram, Alyssa, Rob, Laura or Pascal for some time so we were excited to see everyone. We got in touch with Mikkel and Nok to arrange our stay at The Reef… after last year we had to get the balcony room again!

To get from BKK-CNX we had booked a flight with Thai Vietjet as the time and cost made it the best option. When we purchased the tickets, our credit card was charged twice. We made several attempts online to get it solved but nothing seemed to work. Luckily, when we checked into our flight they were able to give us an email address and we eventually got it sorted. Funnily, we had paid a little extra to book our seats so we weren’t at the very back of the flight… imagine our surprise when we boarded the plane only to find we were in the very last row.

Winter is Coming… Again! Well, it is getting near the end of summer in Canada which means winter is coming! Seems to happen every year. The US border showed no signs of opening up so we decided it was time to head elsewhere. Bill and Tracy had been kind enough to let us spend the summer with them, but it was time to give them back their home. Naturally, our thoughts turned to Thailand and Chiang Mai… which has really become our home away from home.

What? Wait Manitoba? Yep, you bet and what a wonderful time it has been. We spent the month of May in Creston getting vaccinated, helping Paul’s Dad with building a deck, seeing our friends Pati and John and trying to get organized for the continued van build. We had a quick trip to Calgary to see my Mom. She ended up spending a night in hospital with her heart so we went to make sure she was okay.

With the resurgence of COVID in Canada, they had made further entry restrictions. For Canadian citizens we had to have a negative covid test result within 72 hours prior to arrival, take another test on arrival and go to a quarantine hotel for a minimum of 3 nights or until we received a negative result. If you received your negative results in less than 3 days, you were not reimbursed for unused nights and still paid the full amount of $500/night BUT then you were allowed to move to your final destination using air, train or any form of public transportation!

March 5th arrived and we headed out bright and early to get our flight to Bangkok. With Covid making another resurgence, flights were restricted and the direct flight from CNX-HDY no longer operated which resulted in a connection in BKK. We hoped to be able to make the trip in one go, so booked a taxi pick up and ferry tickets for that afternoon hoping we could make it work. The flights were on time and our taxi driver was a maniac so we arrived in time to grab some snacks before getting on the boat.