February 18th - San Francisco to Bangkok

Long day of travel. Left our home at 9am and arrived at the airport at 10am. Our 15 hour flight to Hong Kong left at noon. Flight was comfortable - we had four seats together. The kids did amazingly well despite a period of 10 hours between lunch and dinner when there was no food to be found anywhere. Mostly played computer games, watched movies and slept. The flight took a northern route over Alaska and Siberia and then down passing almost direcly over Beijing. At one point we passed over a cool and barren mountain range in northern Sibera. We finally got to Hong Kong at 7pm giving us under an hour to make it through security and on to our next flight to Bangkok.

View from the plane passing over northern Siberia

At Bangkok we successfully made it through customs, despite our large box of 600 toothbrushes (destined for Bhutan by request of the Ministry of Health). We finally found our ride to the Hotel. At night Bangkok looked just like any other city - although the extreme heat hit us in the face the moment we left the airport. Took about an hour to get to our Hotel by which time it was midnight. Checked into one of the most amazing Hotel rooms we will ever stay it - situated right on the river on the 31st floor. Sammy and Owen were so happy to be not travelling any more and immediately started running around checking out the place. Since we were still hungry we ordered some Chicken Sate and then finally got to bed around 2am.

Sammy and Owen outside the Peninsula Hotel

TV in both our bathrooms