thai one on

Thailand: What an amazing place.

I still can't wipe the smile off my face from the elephant ride and the bamboo raft trip down the river. Our tour guide said we might get wet so we shouldn't bring a camera. Good suggestion. The Thai have a festival in Chiang Mai called the Water Festival. In the downtown area, over a three day period (which becomes seven), everyone delights in soaking everyone with water from the moat, the river, or from barrels with ice water. Great fun and they don't discriminate as to who gets soaked. Business people in suits, tourists, Thai, drivers of cars or motorbikes, doesn't matter. As we were finishing our raft ride, two groups of children lined the raft route and proceeded to splash us as we floated by. SOAKED. And then, we immediately piled into the van for the ride home. a fantastic day.

We are staying with our friends, Terry and Nicki who have been here for almost four years. They are very knowledgeable about what to do and where to go. After the past few days in Chiang Mai, we drove today to Sukothai, ancient seat of the government of Siam. We are in a small resort very close to the Historical city and are going to rent bikes tomorrow and drive around and into the ruins. Will continue taking pictures-am into the second 512GB flash card.

Have seen amazing things and had some great food and great experiences walking around the area. Have met many people at the cooking class we took and the raft and elephant trip. Canadians, Aussies, French and Spaniards. Many people are traveling through this area because it is so inexpensive and beautiful. the people are so friendly and helpful that is impossible to have a bad experience. We have met so many people who are backpacking across South East Asia. Their stories are great to hear.

Notice that I have no pictures with this post. I will try and download them with Terry's computer Sunday or Monday evening before we leave for Part 3 of the tour: Phuket. And after that, China.

Kids, notice that this blog is not very creative. Perhaps, later.

Alaska, here we come

Pre-retirement Trip #2

We are wanting do as much travelling as possible and preparing for retirement. In keeping with that theme, we went to Alaska on a cruise last year in July. We were able to do a 14 day round-trip from Vancouver. It's best to that if you have the time, in case you get rain or clouds or fog on one of the days in port or cruising. We had a wonderful time saw some interesting scenery and met some great people. I have included some pictures.

Note the bright colours.

The next day

Jannose, with our friends who we met on the ship

We ended up spending the next 5 days with our Australian friends. We did many hikes and independent tours together, the above hike to the Ketchikan water reservoir to the waterfalls in Skagway to the Micro-brewery in Juneau. We had so much fun together. Our next holiday, in April in China, Greg and Marilyn are going to join us. Look out China--Aussies and Canadians together. The Great Wall, Forbidden city, Terra Cotta Warriors, Yangtze River Cruise, Shanghai, Suzhou, Hong Kong. We can hardly wait.

This blog is going to be my on-line diary and we hope to be able to upload pictures for our friends to check out.

Tah Dah!!!!

I have been practicing for retirement for over a year now. Travel was always the number one thought for retirement. Teaching for over 33 and a half years was a great time. I really thought it would be hard to leave this profession. Leaving the people and the students probably was the hardest. My staff put on a great production for the four retirees.

These four played the roles of the four retirees.
The actor playing me is wearing a Volleyball
referee shirt, eating vegetables(carrot, cob of corn,
and an eggplant-yes an eggplant(raw) He said
he didn't feel that great that evening.

Like I said, I have been practicing retirement for a little while. Last March, one of the other retirees and myself(with our wives) took 21 students to France and Belgium. We visited many of the battle sites of WWI and WWII and also took the group to cemeteries. We visited the Legion and they gave us some commemorative wreaths to lay at these places. We were able to set up groups of three students to place the wreath at each of the cemeteries we visited.

Laying a wreath at the
Beaumont-Hamel battle site

The group at Juno Beach Centre in
Normandy

Our group at the Menin Gate in Ypres. Each night,
with the exception of the time of German occupation
during WWII, a ceremony takes place here to
remember the fallen soldiers of WWI who do not
have an actual grave. We got to take part in the ceremony
thanks to our Tour Guide.
One of the highlights of the trip.

Of course, I was still in my last year of teaching. But if you talk with the secretaries at school, they say that all I ever did was travel. I needed to retire to get that done.

First post... yeah, how creative

Hey, this is Daorcey here... you know, from www.canmorewedding.blogspot.com.

So, now that my parents have retired (sort of... ok, only one of them), it's about time they entered the 1990s and got a blog and email. Yes, the intertubes will never be the same.

I'll leave it up to them now. Really, it ain't my blog... I suspect I'll be doing tech support from time to time, though.

There you go. Welcome to JanCol 1.0... title to be changed eventually in favour of something more creative.


- Daorcey