I am a Traveler

My sister sings & I snap my fingers - like when we were kids on a road trip. 🎵 “Istanbul. Constantinople. Istanbul. Not Constantinople”. 🎶 This is our theme song as we take the water taxi from my home in Venice to fly to Istanbul onto Bangkok & finally land for 1 night in Chiang Mai. Tomorrow we drive 5 more hours to the Golden Triangle where Laos, Myanmar & Thailand converge. This is the 2nd leg of our journey after spending some days together casa mia in Italy. We are traveling the Silk Road en route to the Far East. We arrive after 29 hours in transit, & our first thought is sleep. I need sleep. But we can’t resist the temptation to dip in the pool on the 7th floor of @anantara_chiangmai before napping in our 3 bedroom suite.

Dad & I have an agreement. He pays flights & land costs. I pay hotel. I use my points. And our hotels are all 5 star ⭐️ luxe on this trip. After a short nap we wake & stumble from our rooms & into a tuk tuk to take us on a night drive alongside the moats & town walls, stopping by at several temples along the way. It’s all so foreign and I can see they think it’s a tad overwhelming but magical. To know me - to know my life - is to be a traveller. Adventure is in my blood. When dad said riding elephants was on his bucket list I sat about making this happen. #dreamsbecomereality. After touring the city we go for dinner at one of my favorite restaurants in the world - The House By Ginger I was so sad to see the store was no longer open. We order family style. Spring rolls & spicy squid salad, Tom Kha Gai soup, black shell crab with pepper sauce & minced beef with Thai sweet basil. My sister & I drank mojitos. The boys drank lime soda. The whole dinner packed a spicy punch. And the evening - though only a few hours to see Chiang Mai after dark - was the perfect introduction to Asia. Dad asks what’s the meaning of all the elephant statues and dragons? Elephants are the guardian of Buddha & earth - they evoke luminosity. Dragons are a symbol of enlightenment and the power of clarity. Travel opens your eyes. It hopefully also opens your mind. As Saint Augustine said “The world is a book. To not travel is to read only a page.”

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