We made it at last!

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After countless hours in a plane we at last reached Chaing Mai around 1030pm Saturday night. Wow I forgot how long of a trip that is! We were greeted by two Thai men in matching shirts with my name on it at the airport and they ushered us to a pretty sweet ride. We climbed in and started driving through the night. They didn't say anything to us and about 40 minutes into the ride I had to ask "how long until we get to the hotel?" The looked at each other, then back at the road, saying nothing. There is usually at least one moment in every trip where you are entrusting a stranger to not rob, murder and dump you in a river... This was that moment. 20 minutes later we arrived safe and sound and realized they just spoke zero English.
We scored a cute Lana style house and scoured the room for snacks. A bag of macadamia nuts and fried banana chips later we were able to fall asleep at last.
The morning brought discovering where in fact we had been deposited the night before. Being the one who had to be in charge of picking the hotels, not wanting to chance some sort of chain hotel that took away Thai flavor, that comes with some responsibility if you blow it. I nailed it. We opened the door to the most tranquil surrounding, the huge and winding tile lined pool with a bridge over it leading to our breakfast that we enjoyed outside. Mountains in the background, trees In Bloom, birds singing, and the sound of elephants trumpeting in the distance. My eyes filled with tears (half exhaustion half overwhelmed that we are here, another dream coming to fruition and I get to share it all with Dave) after breakfast we took a walk and ended up at the riverside coffee house. An open air spot with lovely teak furniture and a deck overlooking the beautiful river with a large bright red arched bridge that led to the other side where there was a parade of elephants decorated with flowers and palms and tourists on there backs walking up and down the river. As we sat having our cappuccino from fine china, listening to the wind chimes and watching my beautiful elephants, excited to see them but sad knowing they are most likely overworked and the mahouts had spiked sticks to use if the elephants got out of line. They looked so beautiful walking through the river, but oh how much more satisfying it would have been to see them doing that of their free will.
We are hanging at the pool today, opting out of an off site adventure and instead looking forward to a 2 hour massage this afternoon and an early bed time to hopefully get back on track by morning.

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