Mom and Roger visit Thailand - Phuket (part 1)

Well, we made it back to after 10 wonderful days with my mom and Roger. As is tradition in the Gloe family, we packed as much into that 10 days as humanly possible. Here's what happened:

Phuket:
Neils and I went to Phuket a few days early to track down the perfect hotel. After spending 1.5 days traipsing around in the heat and humidity I was cursing the fact that I allowed myself to be talked out of booking a room in advance. In the end, we ended up in the exact same rooms I had planned to book online, which were pretty wonderful, but we paid more for them. However, that is where the bad news about our rooms end. We stayed at the Alpina in what they call their Jazz Rooms, which means that our back deck had a ladder that went directly into a pool. The rooms were big and lovely, the bathrooms were too and every morning we at a wonderful breakfast buffet with a huge selection of food. I was quite please with our rooms.

Roger and Mom arrived in Phuket at 5pm on the 8th, so Neils and I met them at the airport (we rented a car). It was so wonderful to see them step out of those security doors! They were relieved to be "not moving" for awhile, so we spent our first evening in Phuket quietly. Well, as quietly as it can be with two Gloe women and Roger.

The next day we got up, ate a great breakfast and headed to the beach. Our hotel has a section of the beach that is reserved for it's customers completely with lawn chairs, towels and umbrellas. We spent all of the morning there taking turns playing in the waves and lounging on the beach chairs. Roger took a bit of a nap in between haggling with the beach vendors, which he seemed to enjoy immensely. (You'll notice a lack of pictures here. That's because my camera was "lost" in the bottom of bag.)

Around lunch time Mom and Roger decided that they wanted to go golfing. We had passed a few golf courses on our way to the beach and I think they had been dancing in Roger's head the whole time the rest of us were enjoying the sand and surf. They caught the shuttle bus back to the hotel and we did not see them again until late in the afternoon. Neils and I hung out for a bit longer on the beach before heading back to the room where we napped, read and lounged. When everyone was reunited and rested, we headed out for dinner. I had read about a jazz restaurant that I thought sounded like an interesting place, after getting agreement from the group we headed out. Um yeah, the book where I read about the restaurant failed to mention the ridiculously steep hike required to eat at the hill top restaurant and we had walked because we were told by the lobby staff that it was so close. At the bottom of the hill, in a little display of defiance/showing off Roger took off on a sort of fast paced run/walk up the hill to the steps. Only to realize that was just the short first part of our ascent. We still had one million steps to climb before we were seated comfortably on our restaurant chairs. He admittedly regretted his little show, about half way up when he sat down to take a little breather from the strenuous exercise. Once we reached the top we experienced some pretty amazing views. We ate a delicious dinner family style, which means we shared. That's right Horstmeyer family, your dad will share, but only if pushed into it. ;-) And then called it a night.

Night view of the island from the restaurant

On our last morning in Phuket, we headed off to the elephant camp where each couple boarded a large elephant complete with a driver and a string of rope essentially thrown over our laps to act as a seat belt, You know, because they are super safety conscious. Our beasts of burden slowly climbed up the hill. We saw some pretty amazing flora, had spectacular views from the top of the hill and laughed a bunch. Our Thai counter parts could tell that Mom and I had natural beast taming abilities so they invited us to climb down from the seat and sit in the command position on the elephants neck. On Mom and Roger's elephant, this is where things got pretty interesting. Roger was instructed to move to the center of the seat and was apparently having a hard time keeping his balance, so being the ultimate in chivalrous man he balanced himself by pushing his feet against Mom's legs. Don't worry, my mom has mad balancing skills so she was able to maintain. We laughed and harassed Roger about that for some time, though.

After the elephant ride, we grabbed lunch at hill top restaurant, again with some pretty spectacular views and then jumped in the car in search of the Naval Port. After driving literally all over the island we finally found it and discovered we were not permitted entrance, but we got to see a lot of the island. After that, we headed home for a nap. After we were rested and refreshed we headed off for our date with the lady boy cabaret. We found the theater, grabbed some dinner close by and headed in. Roger slept through most of it, shows and movies are apparently not his thing, but Neils, Mom and I were pretty impressed. I was told once that some of the most beautiful women in Thailand are actually boys and I can see now where that comes from. It was pretty impressive.

The next day we dropped off our rental car and made our way to the bus station where we started the 5 hour journey to Nakhon Si Thammarat.

The next two days in Nakhon Si Thammarat were packed with more activity and bunch more laughs, so check back for the next installment of Mom and Roger visit Thailand.