R&R

So, I know that Thailand has been the topic of my posts lately and I cannot wait until we get there. This month and next month are going to be great. In exactly 7 days I will have been married for 2 years (according to the State of Georgia) and in exactly 23 days, it will have been 2 years since my wedding. Not usually separate days for most people, but they were for us. We needed our paperwork to get started on lickedy split and we had to have our marriage certificate in that bundle of paperwork so we got married at the courthouse on June 10th 2010. It was super unromantic and we both agreed that we felt nothing during the "ceremony" except (for me) maybe a little embarrassed that we were getting married in the middle of a hallway where prisoners were being escorted to their day in court...awesome, glad you could be here to share the moment. Anyway, 16 days after that we had a beautiful religious ceremony with friends and family and that was wonderful.

At the end of this month we are headed to Thailand for a week and we will get to spend the 4th of July in Thailand! I am so excited because I expect for it to be more of a celebration there than it is here in the Land of the Not Free at ALL. Then I am back 2 weeks before flying out again...and this time, I am headed home. That's right! For 1 month, I will be returning home to Atlanta. Since I work from home now anyway, I figured why not work from home in the States. I can see my friends and family, breathe some fresh air, do summer stuff, hopefully see my cousin's brand new baby boy, see my other cousin who will be a brand new newlywed and do a little much needed shopping for me, hubs and our home.

Will it be a month's vacation? Nope. I will be working nights. Thankfully since I don't make calls the whole 8 hour work day, I can do some of my work during the day and the rest at night...here is what I am thinking:

1. Wake up and check my emails
2. During the day, do some data entry (2 hours..ish)
3. Work from 8pm-2am (6 hours)

This will probably match up well to the amount I get done here. Then at 2 am I will pass out and probably sleep until 10 or 11. Then I can do what I want and plan my data entry in there somewhere. Splitting this up will probably result in me getting more work done anyway. So really, its a win for me and a win for my company, win win :)

I really need this. China has been wearing on me and my emotional health and even though I will miss hubs so much, I think it will be a good choice for us all. No one benefits from someone moping and acting sad all the time. I could not be more happy in my marriage and I love my friends here, but I miss the rest of my family and my friends at home and I miss AMERICA and familiarity.

Vacation Planning

Plane Tickets: Check

Now...time for everything else. At first I thought we would stay in Phi Phi Don which is about 2 hours from Phuket but then I decided that this choice meant being a 2 hour ferry way from the main island and the airport and meant paying higher prices for everything with no increase (in fact an evident decrease) in the quality of most hotels.

So, we will now be staying in main Phuket and are looking at hotels on Kata Beach

Based on the amount that we want to spend and various views from TripAdvisor, we have decided on The Andaman Cannacia Resort.

It's hard for me to choose hotels from websites like this because I have a tendency to want to read all of the negative reviews. Thankfully, although this hotel did have some negative reviews, most of them were a few years old...and lets be honest, the fact that you could stay in that hotel the years after the tsunami was a blessing anyway...so be real. Almost all of the recent reviews were good and the majority of the reviews were very good (excellent would have been better but we are not really wanting to spend the excellent dollars).

Just a note to anyone looking to travel to Asia, before you book something with any of the regular sites you may visit, look into AsiaWebDirect (where you can also book tickets to anywhere else in the world I just discovered). The prices from this website are SO much better than what I found with Agoda, Booking.com, Hotels.com etc.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the hotel and the room that we booked

View from the room

We went for the more expensive villa section of the resort and chose the Garden Spa room for the precise reason that it has a terrace complete with an outdoor Jacuzzi. We don't take too many vacations, so we feel good about this little splurge because we stayed in Asia.

Excited doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about this vacation

Now all that's left is booking our excursions. We know we want to see Phi Phi Don and James Bond Island and I definitely want to go water skiing (I miss it so much). Hubs also wants to get some surfing lessons so we have a decent amount left to book. Anyone with any excursion ideas for Phuket, please feel free to share!

Vacation scheduled!

It's official! For one week in the beginning of July, my husband and I will be chilling on the beach in Thailand.

From Saturday to Thursday we will be staying right outside of Phuket, and on Thursday night we will return to Phuket where we fly out.

Phi Phi Don

The Bay at Ko Phi Phi

I cannot wait to be there for a week of sipping mai tais, lazy days on the beach, fresh air and tons of time alone with my husband with no work, computers or cell phones!