Arrival in Hua Hin!

We arrived in Hua Hin and are at the beautiful home of Kay and Bill. They have built a stunning family retreat on about 5 acres just a few miles out of town. The appropriate word for the house is most likely "villa." It's really beautiful. We will take some photos for you. Our long travel day yesterday was not without incident. We took the taxi to the ferry to the minibus. Turns out the mini bus was a very old Toyota mini van with about 732K kilometers on it in very poor shape. (how many miles is that?)We were packed in it like sardines. Our "direct" route to Bangkok went 2 hours out of the way, making it impossible for us to catch the train to Hua Hin. To top it off, while flying down the road at about 60 mph, the back door of the van came open and the luggage went out right into oncoming traffic. No one ran over it, and our luggage survived OK but it was unbelievable. One man had a laptop computer "with his whole life in it" and it went splat but also survived! By the time we got to Bangkok it was 10 hours later and we said "what the hey" and took a taxi the 3 hours down to Hua Hin. We made it in 2.5 hours, the reason? While loading the luggage in the trunk, we noticed a nice tank of special gas that gave us extra speed. Nitro. The cab ride total? $40 US. Gotta love Thailand. Just wanted to let you know we made if safely and we will update you soon. Sorry about the weather out there in Portland!