Both of the people who have read all of this blog may have noticed a pattern with the travel portions – they virtually all revolve around a professional conference; usually Leigh’s, but occasionally Dan’s.  We’ve taken some AMAZING vacations, but the choice of destination is generally dictated by where ICMPC, or IPAC, or ACTOR, or SPECTRE is having their conference that year.  (The tote bag for the last one was amazing.)

But the problem with that approach is that you don’t have any say in the destination, so if there’s somewhere in particular you want to go, you only have two options: keep waiting until one of your organizations decides to go there, or else look up who is planning a conference in your desired city, and then go become a pediatrician, or a forensic accountant, or a Lutheran, or whatever.

And since we didn’t want to have to pick a synod, we appeared to be out of luck.

Turns out, however, there’s a loophole.  You’re allowed to just… go somewhere?  Like, you can buy tickets on an airline, and then reserve a room at your destination, and they just let you do it.  You don’t even need a cheap tote bag full of vendor tchotch or shark laser upgrades.

Who knew, right?

We were very excited to discover this fact, and decided that for our first trick, we wanted to go to Thailand.  We wanted to see wildlife, and experience culture, and sit on a beach and… Nah, let’s be honest – we wanted to eat ourselves stupid. And then maybe look at some culture once dinner had settled.

We chose late November as our preferred travel time, since it is largely past the end of the monsoon season but before the start of the Christmas travel season. Like with Japan, we spent so much time PLANNING the trip, that by the time our departure rolled around, preparing for this trip had basically become a part time job of its own.

But the fateful day arrived, and we were off to (checks notes) Seoul!

Wait, what?  Yeah, it turns out that although you CAN take a direct flight from Vancouver to Bangkok, no one in their right mind would want to, so we flew KAL.  Here’s a picture of us with a terrifying mascon in the Incheon airport.

And then just a short 5 hours later, we landed in Bangkok, caught a ride share to our hotel, and collapsed.  Actual Thailand will commence in the next entry.