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Read more: Italy and France 2026On April 8th, we flew nonstop from Bangkok to Rome, and on to Sicily. Because of the ongoing war in Iran, our flight took about 45 minutes longer to avoid going over that area. Beginning in Palermo, Sicily, we traveled by train east and then north along the coastline of Italy, continuing up to the Cinque Terre area and then west to Marseille, north to Provence, then finished in Paris before flying back to Amboy via Chicago. It was a fun 6 weeks, with sunny, comfortable weather for the first five weeks, then a bit of rain! More to be…
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Read more: Eastern Europe 2025On September 3rd, 2025 we head back to Thailand via six weeks in Eastern Europe. PDX-DEN-FRA-IST flights. Start in Istanbul, then Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Hungary, before flying back to Bangkok from Munich nonstop. We begin in Istanbul, then fly to Bulgaria, and travel by car for a week. Then fly to Romania, and travel by car for two weeks. Then we fly to Serbia, and visit friends. Then on to Budapest for a last week or so. We will be just across a river from western Ukraine, but as Russia has been making misslle attacks on border crossing, we…
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Read more: Australia 2025It’s time to head back to the USA for the summer. We’re now beginning to (post-Covid) stop somewhere along the way in each direction to explore. Our first exploration will be Tasmania, Melbourne and Sydney for a month. As I previously posted a detailed trip report for my 2017 hiking in Tasmania, I won’t repeat what is duplicated, but just put new details here. To see that trip report, click here: Tasmania 2017 We begin our visit in Hobart, founded in 1804 as a British penal colony, located on an excellent protected harbor. Many of the early buildings have survived. We’ll…
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Read more: Transcontinental Road Trip 2024On April 2, 2024, Pin and I embarked on a seven week long road trip circling the USA from south to north, covering over 9,000 miles. I wouldn’t attempt this without the assistance of Tesla’s Full Self Driving beta software. It makes the long freeway stretches relaxing and more fun. I’ll try to enter installments as we go along on the trip. Our Tesla Model Y LR 2023 Last summer, we drove 6,000 miles in the Western USA using Autopilot. It was helpful, but not close to perfect. This summer, we’ll be using the new neural network-based FSD 12.3.2.1 initially.…
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Read more: Building a home in Thailand November 2019As a previous post explained, four years after the death of my wife Judy from cancer, I remarried. When you marry a Thai woman, as I did, you also marry her whole extended family. It is not uncommon for farang (foreigners) to not know this, and it leads to many eventual divorces. I had spent enough time in Thailand to understand this, and took it into account before proposing. The Thai people and culture have much appeal, and I decided to make the big cultural leap. As part of our premarital negotiations, we agreed to spend 6 months or more…