The highlight of the week was going to the Chiang Mai sticky waterfall, where we got to experience that natural phenomenon and meet a new friend (day 231).

Throughout the week we have been taking in the super bowl and the olympics, and working a lot on blog migrations (day 227). We ran into some inconvenient Airbnb issues (day 228 and 229), and we celebrated AC’s birthday with some western culture favorites (day 23). I resumed our taxes only to hit another road block (also day 230).

The remainder of the week was taken up by additional blog migration tasks, blog posts, intestinal issues, and a Nimman date night (days 232 and 233).

Travel Log: Day 227 (2/9), Thailand

Early this morning we decided to subscribe to a month of Peacock in order to watch the super bowl and the olympics. We watched the super bowl and then just started school late around 10:30am when it was over. Nothing special about the school day otherwise, and I went to the gym in the middle of it.

In the afternoon, and into the evening I worked on migrating this blog to Hostinger from Bluehost. I subscribed to four years of the business + AI plan, and then got ready for the migration. Rather than migrating my blog myself, I submitted the request to Hostinger since they do it for free. I screwed it up though by changing the name servers too early on Bluehost. After reverting those and resubmitting the request it got migrated pretty quickly.

The site was broken and wouldn’t load at all except some generic error message. Copilot and I worked through it, turning on debugging and then disabling problematic plugins. I had to add some of the plugins back in to gain functionality back like subscribe and stats. I see as I type this I need to get Yoast back as well. Everything seems functional now though. I turned off debug mode and then initiated the domain transfer.

Travel Log: Day 228 (2/10), Thailand

The school and gym schedule was back to normal today. Last night our cooktop stopped working when a breaker tripped. We flipped the breaker back on and everything is working but the cooktop. Someone is coming tomorrow to look at it. Because of that we ate breakfast at home, but then ate lunch at a place on Chiang Mai campus that BC wanted to go to, and for dinner we had 7-Eleven.

In the afternoon I did over an hour of Spanish between Duolingo and Dreaming Spanish, and then took a nap. Spent time through the day fiddling with Hostinger, but things are mostly going well with the migration.

Travel Log: Day 229 (2/11), Thailand

I didn’t go to the gym this morning because we had a couple guys arriving in the morning to fix the cooktop. School went ahead like normal except for shuffling a couple subjects so the kids could go to the bedroom when the guys were here. They arrived at 11am and had it fixed within 30 minutes.

We ate all of our meals at home today since we could now cook. We took some walks, but otherwise didn’t do much.

Travel Log: Day 230 (2/12), Thailand

Today is AC’s birthday. We did school as usual, and I went to the gym.

In the afternoon I worked on our taxes after getting our final 1099 form. I’m going pretty deep into documenting everything I entered for our rental house. This is a new tax situation for me and I don’t know if I’m more likely to be audited, and more importantly I want to ensure I’m doing the taxes correctly. I hit a roadblock on entering the asset improvements because the feature isn’t ready yet in Turbotax. I’m on hold again until I hear from them that it’s ready.

For lunch we went to a restaurant at the Maya mall called “The Duke’s”, which is an American style restaurant. The menu was extensive with about every kind of American food you can imagine. It was pretty expensive for here, around $40. It was also super confusing because I couldn’t figure out if I should tip with it being American style. There was a note about a service charge for tables with more than six people, which lead me to believe we should. I ultimately chickened out and didn’t. The servers were hovering nearby and I thought I was looking dumb in my indecision.

We went to DQ from there and got an ice cream cake. We tried to get a tuk-tuk ride home but he turned us down because he can only really carry two people. He pointed us to a red truck and JC asked the driver how much, and he said 200 BHT. That was way too much so we just walked fast so the cake wouldn’t melt.

We all ate leftover pizza for dinner. JC and AC both ordered what we thought would be personal sized pizzas for lunch, and it turned out to be enough to feed them at lunch, all of us for dinner, and some still leftover.

We watched the next Marvel movie in AC’s lineup.

Travel Log: Day 231 (2/13), Thailand

Today was our trip to the sticky waterfall. The tour was supposed to pick us up, but they contacted us asking to change the pickup point to the mall because they had too many complicated hotel pickups. We left to walk to the mall at about 8:30am, and joined the van already full of the other six people. There was a French family with two adults and a girl Alexis’ age. There was a row of three young Germans, two of which were a couple it seemed and one by herself.

Cave

The ride there was uneventful, and our first stop was a massive cave at the top of a bunch of stairs. The cave was massive and had a Buddha statue inside. The story of the cave was something about two princesses living in it, and I clearly didn’t pay attention very well.

Waterfall

Next up was the sticky waterfall just a few minutes down the road. Upon arrival we walked down a bunch of stairs to get to the bottom of the waterfall. It reminded me of the La Fortuna waterfall steps, only not nearly as nicely maintained. The stairs were hastily built and I worried about going through some of the boards. This walkway in the picture is actually a much nicer and safer path going to a natural spring in the same area.

The falls themselves were unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Sticky is the wrong term. They should be called grippy waterfalls. You feel like you have a ton of traction navigating them. You can step on near vertical rock faces and still have enough traction to climb with water running on it. The only down side is there were a TON of people there as you can see in this picture. We learned that school was out for some reason, and it’s not normally that busy.

Group Lunch

After we climbed the falls we went to a buffet lunch with our group. We ended up talking to the lone German girl quite a bit. We learned that she has had no need to get a drivers license where she lives (Munich), and it costs $4K to get one. She traveled through Europe after high school, mainly France, Spain, Italy, and one other place I can’t recall. JC told her our situation, and she thought it was amazing and that it’s highly unusual to her since it is illegal to homeschool in Germany. She also had a good friend that grew up in Costa Rica and liked it but chose to raise her kids in Germany because of how they foster independence early on, and because of walkability.

Ride Back and Friday Afternoon Club

The ride back was equally uneventful, and everyone was tired. There was a lot of half asleep head bobbing going on in the van.

We got food from 7-Eleven for dinner, and did our usual FAC routine minus the alcohol. It was my movie pick so I chose the 2013 Star Trek movie, the second one in that series.

Travel Log: Day 232 (2/14), Thailand

JC and I went running separately, me at the gym and her around the reservoir. I ran a 5k but it wasn’t spectacular. I’m still not up to full strength after feeling off the past few days.

Throughout the day I worked on the blog post about managing money while traveling internationally. That post took a lot of time and dominated my day.

At lunch we went to Srifaa’s. We sat there for a while and never saw her, but as we got up to leave she came walking in the front with things she had purchased (vegetables, etc). We figured that she got ingredients from the other stands right around her restaurant. It’s probably part of why everything seems fresh and high quality.

In the evening JC and I went to get some drinks and snacks. We had happy hour in the courtyard, and then just JC and I went to T-Ten for dinner. I had a club sandwich that was good but not like an American club. It had egg on it and was much drier than usual. JC and I watched the final episode of 11.22.63 while the kids watched Beast Games.

Travel Log: Day 233 (2/15), Thailand

I slept in this morning which was good because I’ve felt a bit off the past couple days. BC has something going on as well, and he’s been two-stepping. JC gave him DiaResQ which seemed to help.

Blog Migration

JC and I went to the grocery store today and got our final haul of groceries. We’re in the last days where we’ll have to try to eat our way out of here and not over-buy.

The rest of our day was taken up migrating JC’s blog to Hostinger alongside this one. Her’s was more of a headache for some reason. I had to manually disable about a dozen plugins and her theme, then try to get her theme going again. After getting that sorted out we disabled auto-renew in her Bluehost account and pointed the name servers over to Hostinger.

At that point we got an alert from Chase that they denied a $350 charge from Bluehost, which was the amount the Bluehost renewal was going to be. This was puzzling because we still have over two weeks before the renewal date. It was lucky chase denied it. That gave us a chance to go in there and mangle her payment info so they can’t attempt it again. The timing is beyond suspicious, like they have something to trigger the renewal if it’s close and steps are being taken to migrate out. It may be pure coincidence of timing though.

In the end the migration is complete except for waiting for the domain to transfer ownership.

Nimman Date Night

JC and I went to dinner in the Nimman One area that we previously had drinks at. We ate a few different food stands. I had kabobs and a salad, and JC had a salad and dumplings. It was all really good, and we sat in the open area with live music.

We went walking around when we were done eating, and got tricked into walking through a fake-ass Ikea. I was sort of pissed off about it, but it was also sort of funny. There was an escalator to an upper floor of a building right by the dining/music courtyard. I thought we should just see what’s up there, so we went up to realize you would have to jump a fence to get to the down escalator. You can’t see this from down below; looks just like a regular up and down escalator. It then funnels you through a turnstile into a bunch of stores with a one way path. You have to walk through ALL of it to get out of there. We should have just hopped the fence.