And I’m so frickin excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This trip is the culmination of many thoughts and ideas spanning over the last 6 months. It all started when I read about flying around the world, literally. I though I would treat myself to this experience as my 30th birthday gift. Though time off from work and the large expense for such a grand adventure seemed to plague me so I needed to adapt.
I knew I would be coming into my scheduled vacation time at work in the month of September. After talking to a few people about travel ideas, Asia kept coming up. I’ve been to Europe a dozen or so times for pleasure, Canada and Mexico for work, and felt it was time to see the other side of the planet. One way or another Thailand came into the picture.
At first I was planning to visit Thailand solo, as in on my lonesome. Then my girlfriend thought it sounded like a fun trip and asked me to tag along. How could I say no? It also turns out that 2 of my other airline friends, Brian and Kevin, also had vacation time in September, so they too asked to tag along. Brian’s wife was able to negotiate time off from work and Kevin was now bringing a friend, too. My solocation to Thailand was now going to be a party of 6! Heck yeah 
To manage all these people and travel plans for 6 I created a private Facebook group for us to post and keep up to date with. Over the course of about a month and a half, we all added the cities and excursions we were interested in and the trip pretty much planned itself.
It’s now 10:34pm and I’m staying up ALL night so that I’ll be able to sleep on the flight tomorrow – it departs at Noon. It’s a 17 1/2 hour flight from Washington-Dulles to Tokyo and then another 6 1/2 hours from Tokyo to Bangkok. Since Bangkok is 11 hours ahead of DC time we figured that by staying up all night we’d be tired enough to sleep during the first portion of the Tokyo flight. Why does this make sense? Because when we actually do get to sleep on the plane it will be after midnight in Bangkok and effectively going to bed (on the plane) but on Asia time. This is important since travel time is 24 hours total.
We’ll arrive in Bangkok at 11pm and it’d be nice if we could get some sleep in the local time zone when we get to our hotel to help us adapt to the huge time change. Hopefully staying up all night and sleeping on the plane will make for a nice transition to minimize jet lag. We (the girlfriend and I) seem to think it will work out.
To stave off the exhaustion I’ve downed a 20 ounce Starbucks. On backup I have Red Bull, Powerade, and good old fashion water. Man I hope this works…
Here goes nothing!
Len
