Of course two of my children were not born yet and our adopted daughter though she was born in 1985 we didn't meet her until she was about 12 to 15 years old. I think my wife first met her when she was 12 years old.
So, this is before my three daughters were either born or adopted.
The point being "We were babes in the woods"
What do I mean?
We were from California and we knew we were going to have an adventure. My wife then demanded to take our kids along and I didn't want to go alone there. A form of Vajrasattva known as Vajra Kilays or Dorje Phurba came to me at a job I had then from about May through october of 1985 and 1986 when I returned from India, Nepal, Thailand and Japan.
So, after I got off work for 6 months (even though we owned another business too) I had taken this job as a fire lookout 6 months a year for the California Department of Forestry then and the alternate lookout was a good friend of my wife's for years too. Mostly I took this job because my children had really good healthcare through the State of California and my wife and I did too while I worked there. Often being a business owner affording health insurance for the 5 of us then wasn't financially practical for us. So, having great medical and dental and eye and ear car was amazing while I worked for the State of California part of the year as a Fire Lookout. But, also the reason I could take off 6 months to travel to India and Nepal and Thailand and Japan was that this job was ONLY May through October of any given year.
So, we all flew to Japan first then to Thailand for a week or two which began our December to April "Journey through Asia" which permanently changed all our lives forever. Was this a good thing?
It was more real than anything we have ever done up to this point. Dealing with Dead people in India was a lot to deal with because often there were unattended bodies in cities and out in the country which was difficult for us as Westerners to understand. Of everything we faced there this was the hardest, Dead Bodies. But, we only saw dead bodies in India nowhere else.
We started off landing in Thailand after taking off from Narito Airport in Japan and we arrived about 1 am in the morning sort of disoriented from flying total around 17 hours since San Francisco. So, it's possible that at 1 am it was actually 1pm in San Francisco a different day or something like that.
Taxi drivers ran to take our luggage and then drove us at around 90 mph across the city because it was late at night. We were in two taxis tandeming to Sweety's Guest House which was about 5 dollars per person per night to stay there I believe. Then they cooked us breakfast downstairs and it only cost about 5 dollars to feed all 5 of us well. We met an American Nurse traveling with a German Carpenter. They told us that the first week we were anyplace we might get ripped off financially until we either hired someone to bargain for us or learned the right price to pay for things there. So, eventually we hired a young college student who spoke English to travel with us to Koi Samed Island near Bangkok Thailand where we snorkeled and also rented a wind surfer which is sort of a paddleboard with a sail where you stand up and said around on the board. I got pretty good and this and so did my oldest Stepson, Chris.
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