7 years on
Wednesday, November 30th, 2016I just ran across this old blog of mine. Looks like my last entry was from sometime back in 2009 or so. My how things have changed in the last 7 years. I took that trip to SE Asia back in September of ’09. It ended up taking me back to Thailand and on to a few new places. I spent about a month in Cambodia, mostly Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. One major highlight was going to see the ruins of Angkor, which was the seat of the Khmer kingdom from the 9th to the 15th centuries. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to say the least and something I will never forget. My travels also took me to Vietnam, a place I’ve always had an itch for and a place that really left me longing to go back. I stayed in Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon) and toured the Mekong Delta region for roughly two weeks. I was traveling with an English bloke I met back in Thailand and we had a hell of a time exploring HCM city. One of our excursions was to go see the Cu Chi tunnels, which during the war were a major network of underground tunnels all over northwestern Saigon that aided in securing victory for the Viet Cong in the war with the United States. We rode two-up on a motorbike thinking it was only going to take a short time to get there and later found out it was much much farther away. We had some really sore asses after that trip and it makes me think twice whenever I look at a map to check distances from now on.
After returning from Vietnam and Cambodia I decided to check out a city in Northern Thailand named Chiang Mai. It turned out to be just the kind of place I was looking for so I decided to spend a few months there soaking up the culture and studying a bit of Thai language and Muay Thai (Thai boxing). I really enjoyed my stay up there as the weather is more like I’m use to back here in the west, cool in the evenings and not too hot during the days, and it’s nestled up in the mountains so you get some great scenery and some fun twisty roads to traverse on the motorbike. As luck would have it I ended up meeting some good friends as well. Two of them, a Dane and a German, I still keep in touch with to this day!
Now here is where the story starts to get interesting. This whole time since 2007 I’ve had a girlfriend. I met her here in Los Angeles after returning from my first trip abroad back in 2006. She is from Thailand and with me having spent a lot of time over there, naturally we hit it off pretty good. So good in fact that we now have two lovely children together, a six year old daughter named Miranda and a 9 month old son named Aspen. I’ve often thought that some day I would like to have children but always much later in life. Perhaps things happen for a reason, perhaps not, but they are the light of my life. Before kids I think I was like most people, very self-centered and probably a little lost in life. I didn’t really have a sense of direction or know what I wanted out of life. Not to say that they gave me the answers I was looking for, but having children kind of takes the focus off of yourself and gives you a really good reason to want to be here. I still long to travel but now hope that they are involved in my future adventures. Some of my best days are spent just being with them and going for a family walk in the park or hanging out together at home. Kids really do change your life in more ways than one.
That pretty much sums up my life in the past seven years. Things have happened – for the better – that I really wasn’t prepared for at the time and I’ve just made the best of it. That’s about all you can do in life, just make the best of it!
Teal