Coming Home

It is currently 8 PM in Bangkok, and in about eight hours, Andy and I will be boarding a shuttle to the airport, aiming for a 6 AM arrival for our 8 AM flight.

At 8 AM, we will board a flight for Hong Kong, followed by a flight to Vancouver, followed by a flight to New York, accounting for a grand total of a little more than 26 hours airport-to-airport time. At that point, Andy and I will go our separate ways; he to crash on a couch then head back upstate, and I to sleep on a chair in JFK awaiting my morning flight back to O'Hare.

It's a weird feeling, knowing that the end is so close. It's hard for me to really get my head around it or to believe that this is all coming to an end. It feels like it just started-- I'm writing this post from the same place I first checked internet in Bangkok 11 weeks ago. We've made new friends and gotten into some hairy situations; Andy's been robbed twice, I'm on my third pair of sandals; I crashed a motorcycle and tore up my arm, Andy was intimidated by a gang of marauding kittens...and we've had a great time throughout.

There's no doubt that this trip has had its ups and downs for me, and I feel as though I may have posted (on the rare occasions when I did actually post) more on the downs than I would've liked, or at the very least I would've liked to balance it out with more positive posts to reflect the true balance of my feelings on this trip-- undoubtedly falling strongly toward the positive side of the scale.

I'm definitely a wiser traveler than I was in mid-January, and I'll take that with me on my future journeys. Hopefully, I'm a slightly wiser and more conscientious person in general, and I can take that with me in my day-to-day existence, regardless of in what part of the world I may find myself.

I'd like to thank everyone for reading the blog and for sharing your input and wise comments, if you've taken the time to do so. If not, thanks for just reading. I'm not entirely sure where I'll end up next, or if there will be any blogging in my future, but I am happy that this one is here to look back on.

Thanks again for reading, and hopefully I'll be able to catch up with many of you in real life instead of over the internet very shortly.

Wish us luck for the journey home.