The Journey!

I'm a little late in posting all this but as you can imagine, the past few weeks have been pretty crazy for us all! I'll break up the posts a little to bring you all up to speed with our new life here in Bangkok, Thailand!

After weeks and weeks of packing and preparing, we finally set out for our journey on Thursday, July 24th. We had a HUGE amount of luggage but then, when you are moving a family of six halfway around the world, there just is no easy way to travel light! I think we checked 7 or 8 pieces of luggage (including 2 car seats) and for carry on, we had 10 or 11 pieces - it looked like a small tour group was departing as we loaded up the car(s). We actually had to take our van and a truck to get us all to the airport and had two vans pick us up from the airport here in Bangkok when we arrived. There's a picture of us and all of our luggage below....you get the idea!
The trip was surprisingly uneventful. We had a quick flight to LA, a three hour layover there, and then we boarded our non-stop flight to Bangkok at 11 pm. The kids (except Tim) all slept for an hour or so in the business class lounge in LA, so they were awake and raring to go when we boarded the Thai flight. We got on board, immediately were served a huge dinner once we were airborne (thank goodness we ordered kids' meals for the kids - I don't think they would have been big fans of the pate (spelling?) and poached salmon! They then passed out after eating and everyone slept for at least 6 hours or so. The kids spent the rest of the 17 hour flight playing video games, dozing (or sleeping in the case of Nate -gotta love Benedryl), coloring, and really behaving FAR better than I expected.

We arrived here at 6:30 am Saturday morning (big time change!) and went immediately to our temporary apartment and once unpacked, headed out to the grocery store to get some food. the kids all passed out by about 1 pm and slept clear through until 1 am, when they woke up raring to for the day! Rick and I both were asleep by 5 or so, so at least we got a bit of sleep, too. The next couple of days were spent slowly getting onto this time zone so that we could start to explore our new community a little and take it all in!

Here's a couple of pictures of us heading out: