Motorcycle Weekend

It's been a full weekend - to say the least.  Yesterday we started off with a meeting of the Big Breakfast Club.  I've always known that breakfast is my favorite meal, but we've met several others with the same feeling.  So, we've formed a club - The Big Breakfast Club.  We got together at Brad and Becky (some new friends of ours) house and they had already begun the preparations...eggs with all sorts of goodies in them, hash browns from the states that Becky had been saving for a special occasion, waffles, fruit salad, sausages from who-knows-where, yogurt, juices, and a mocha drink.  Incredible!  In the midst of stuffing ourselves with the goodness, we decided that all it could take for world peace is a good fruit salad.

After enjoying great food and fun conversation, we were off to the races on our motorbikes.  The crew took off for the day's adventure.  We rode and rode. On our way we stopped and saw our first Chiang Mai elephants.  There's a place  fairly close to us where you can pay a fee and learn how to be a mahout for the day - how to feed and clean the elephants and take care of them.  Pretty cool.  Finally after riding over a couple mountains and through several villages we ended in the town of Sumong.  When there, we discovered some great caves and explored those for a bit.  I was more into just looking at them rather than walking through them and being flown over by the thousands of bats that there were - but what one member of the BBC does, they all do.  So I swallowed my squirmishes and spelunkled on.  You'll see a picture below of Bret and me, and Brad and Becky (thanks Steve for taking the picture) right before Bret's headlamp went out.  Only two of our group rented the 75 cent headlamps, so we were really thankful only one of them went out.  I'm sure we'd still be in the caves now if they had both gone out.

On our way home we hit some rain - it was nothing compared to last week's ride in the rain though.  Last week we were heading home from dinner on the motorbike, and out of nowhere a massive storm hit.  Thunder and lightning, stinging rains, the whole bit.  We of course did not have ponchos, like most motorbike drivers in Thailand do.  We continued on until we just couldn't go any farther, and we pulled over to stop at a 7-11, about 10 dry Thais just looked at us and started cracking up.  It didn't look like we had been stuck in the rain; it looked like we had just jumped into a pool, swam a few hundred laps, and decided to quickly go pay our electric bill at the 7-11(which is what we do at the 7-11).  It was pretty hilarious, so yesterday's rain was nothing.

It was a full and fun day - the weeks are full of hard work (you can ask Bret about that - he's gotten to deal with 2.5 medical emergencies over the past 3 weeks in PE weeks) and the weekends are full of adventure.  We're thankful to be here!