Getting Ready to Go

Monday we begin our adventure by making the flight to Atlanta to catch a plane that will eventually get us to Thailand where we will spend a day before moving on to Bhutan.  

The trip will be through Bhutan, Nepal, and Tibet, with a short stop over in Beijing on the way home. Since this is new territory for us, we'll try to keep postings regular to help absorb what we see, and take pictures of places where not that many US visitors go.

The blog name Tibet was chosen because no one knows how to spell Bhutan, and Tibet makes the name easier to remember.

Weather in Gulf Breeze this Saturday has been rainy, and Santa Rosa and Okaloosa Counties have been under flooding conditions for the better part of the day. Strangely, all but one flight to Atlanta are on time, and there haven't been any cancellations.  Lately, we've had really bad luck with Atlanta weather problems, and I missed my San Diego connection the last trip west because my flight from PNS to ATL was delayed 6 hours.  Spent a short night at Ryan and Katrina's place in Atlanta and managed to get on the morning flight west, just barely.  Flying has ceased to be fun, and I keep hearing the old SatNightLive song, "Cattle Car with Wings" buzzing through my head.

With luck we'll make it to ATL in time to catch the flight to Japan and switch planes to get to Bangkock.

GPS is loaded up with all 4 caches in Tibet, and a hundred or so in Nepal and Bhutan. A batch for Bangkok, and the Beijing area has about 150, so all in all, not much caching going on.  www.geocaching.com   Hopefully, I'll add 5 countries to my have cached list.

House sitter is ready to move in to take care of the cats, including the temporary orange furball Katniss, and the work crew has their list of things to fix while we're gone.  Just waiting for the bus, figuratively, but then again, given the way airlines are behaving lately, maybe a literal bus would be more comfortable.

FYI, Tibet isn't really Tibet anymore it's the Xizang Autonomous Region,  a province-level autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It was created in 1965 on the basis of Tibet's absorption into the PRC in 1951. But people still call it Tibet, just like Saigon will always be Saigon, despite Uncle Ho's name being tacked onto the place.