THAILAND! Day One.

So, we are back from our wonderful vacation in Thailand. Since I didn't blog while we were ON the trip, I thought I'd do a post for each day NOW and we can pretend I was doing it DURING, not after. Here goes:

After our (delayed) flight arrived in Bangkok at 2 a.m. we took a taxi to our hotel and crashed! Woke up, had a great breakfast and headed to the pier for a one-hour canal and river tour - it was fantastic. The river was swollen with monsoon rains, so it was quite a ride!

We were dropped off near the Grand Palace and Wat Po, but it was a holiday and the larger temples were closed...so we took a tuk-tuk (motorized rickshaw) around to some of the smaller temples. One was tucked away in a shopping district - it had a great reclining Buddha:

We saw another gorgeous Wat with amazing glass and mirror work around the doors, windows and eaves. The workmanship and the wood here in Thailand is just so stunning.

A few more stops and then back to the boat dock which had a great outdoor "food court" where we ate DELICIOUS lunch for about $6 for the four of us! Then, back to the hotel, a quick swim in the lovely pool and then off to the train station to catch our overnight train to Chiang Mai!!

The train was just great: we had a sleeper car which was really two adjacent rooms with seats that later a lovely fellow came in and VERY efficiently made into 4 beds. The real treat was dinner - the food on the train was mind boggling! We fell asleep to the lullaby of the train's rocking, happy as the Thai countryside passed outside our windows.