5th Anniversary Trip to Thailand!

We can hardly believe it, but Brian and I have been married five years already! We wanted to do something big for this milestone anniversary. (Well, we thought it would be a good excuse to go on a big trip...) We've had Thailand on our travel list for some time - we know several people who have been and loved it, and Brian's mom lived there with her family when she was in middle and high school. She lived all over the world, and Thailand was her favorite. All of this was enough reason for us to check it out ourselves!

We talked to people who have been, and did some research ourselves, and came up with the following itinerary - Bangkok, Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, and Railay Bay. All in all it was an amazing trip. We were able to see where Brian's mom grew up and went to school, visited a lot of amazing Wats (temples), rode elephants, went hiking up waterfalls, participated in the Songkron Festival (the Thai new year celebrations), went to the largest outdoor market in the world, went snorkeling in the Andaman Sea, and renewed our wedding vows on one of the world's most beautiful beaches. We packed a lot into our two week trip, but had an amazing time.

Logistics
I've been saving Delta Skymiles since 2005 when I took my first international trip to Europe for my study abroad program. After nearly seven years, I finally had enough for a flight to a far away land! As you might expect, it proved to be difficult to find a flight and actually use the miles, but we eventually made it work. I recommend calling the airline directly to find out what flight options are available because flights with their partner airlines don't show up online. We were able to get a much better flight, for less Skymiles by flying Delta domestically and Korean Air internationally. We flew from Jacksonville to Atlanta on Delta, and then from Atlanta to Seoul, South Korea and Seoul to Bangkok on Korean Air. We really enjoyed Korean Air - everyone was extremely friendly; the customer service was phenomenal. I think a large part of this is the Asian culture - in general, from our experience, they just seem to go the extra mile for you.

The flights weren't as bad as we anticipated. The flight from Atlanta to Seoul was about 14 hours, and the flight from Seoul to Bangkok was about 5 hours. The entire trip from the time we left Jacksonville until the time we landed in Bangkok was 26 hours. The long flights had individual TVs in each of the seats with movies, games, music, etc. So between that, reading material, food, and naps, the flights went by much more quickly than we anticipated.

One difficult thing with Korean Air is you can't book your seats online. You have to call within one month of the flight and request specific seats. We booked my flight through Delta to use the Skymiles and wanted to book Brian's through them also, but it was going to cost about five times as much to do so, so we booked through Cheaptickets.com. (I'm not quite sure why or how much sense that makes, but oh well...) Since we booked through two different venues, it proved to be somewhat difficult to ensure we had seats together, requiring five or so calls to Korean Air and a lot of frustration. At the end of the day, after giving our sob story of it being our anniversary trip and being heartbroken if we weren't able to sit together, we did get seats next to each other AND Korean Air had an anniversary cake for us on our way to Asia! We tried to look at the seat map on SeatGuru.com to figure out the best seats and request those, but something went awry and we missed the "best" seats by a couple of rows on each flight. Bummer! Oh well, we survived and somehow managed to have a row to ourselves on each of the flights going to Asia, but not so much on the way back.

One more note about the flights - apparently, what "class" flight is booked determines whether or not you'll get frequent flier miles for the trip. We were excited because we thought Brian would get 20,000+ Skymiles for this trip (getting us another free flight in the near future), but apparently when we booked through Cheaptickets.com we booked the "class" that wasn't eligible for Skymiles. A bit ridiculous if you ask me. Cheaptickets doesn't post the class before you book, so we had no way of knowing that would be the case. We complained afterward and all we ended up with was a wasted hour on the phone and a $50 credit from Cheaptickets (which they gave us a hard time about using when we tried to cash it in). So the moral of the story is - you have to call Cheaptickets before booking a flight to make sure the class you're booking is eligible for frequent flier mile credit.

So with that, I'll leave you with a some pictures from each of the cities and will break the rest of the trip into separate posts about the various cities.