Part of being in Chiang Mai was having time to decide what was next. We had extended our lease until September, but then what? We decided that we wanted to travel again — exciting — but where? Spoilt for choice, we started watching travel vlogs, reading blogs, and came to the conclusion: time for a road trip!

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 included visits with my Mom, cleaning the apartment, a trip to the storage unit with John C.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.