Umbrella making very cool. Bombarded by pink wave of Thai tourists. We were the attraction. 15 minutes of touching, pictures of US. People love that we have 5 kids. The men go on about Peter's power. Uh, what about mine? ;) Try, try, try to find silk factory to watch make silk from cocoon. Very sad couldn't find. Drive beautiful rice fields. Peter doing good driving on left. Australia trip and Guatemala good practice for driving here. Left in Aussie and crazy in Guat. Thai is both. Can't master the blinker though, always turns windshield wiper on instead. Thankfully, gas pedal still on same side!
About 20 minutes after leaving Chiang Mai, we reached the town of Bo Sang. We stopped at a paper factory and unfortunately, they weren't doing demonstrations that day, but I was in heaven with all the hand bound books. Then we went to an umbrella making factory and aside from getting mauled by a sea of pink, it was very enjoyable. In retrospect, it was kind of fun to be so liked, but at the time the children were naturally a little intimidated with all the touching, swarming, and picture taking and we were genuinely relieved to extricate ourselves.
It looked like the store had some cool stuff, but they truly would not leave us alone. If we attempted to move somewhere else, they would follow us and another person would start taking pictures and grab at the children. It was impossible to shop with all the gawking.
Umbrella Making
Carving on Lathe
All that work for a $3 umbrella!! Once we were done there, we headed down the road a few minutes to San Kamphaeng. We drove back and forth down the main road (no easy task to navigate) about six times and on a few side roads looking for the silk factory with no luck. Man, Peter was cranky. We found somewhere decent to eat and then tried looking some more, but still couldn't find it. We did manage to finally find a battery for my watch and another memory card for the camera. Even with food in his belly, Peter was fed up with looking for the factory. So, we moved on and I was sad, but after seeing some beautiful scenery I got over it. Both our crankiness was completely washed away when we came upon the "Supper Highway" signs. There were also some quaint looking monasteries, but the road was narrow and winding, so we didn't stop to take pictures of them.
Rice Paddy
Scarecrows...wonder what they are called in Thailand
Thailand is the world's largest exporter of rice
We were going to take the scenic route to Lamphun and see the rubber trees. In the end, we decided to go as fast as we could while the baby was still happy, so we got on the "Supper Highway". No rubber trees, but we did get to see this HUGE statue from the highway.
I took another close-up of the front, but frankly I'm doing you a favor by showing you it from a distance
He looked like a giant gold Yoda...OK that is an over-exaggeration.
What can I say? There's a little bit of us sprinkled all over Thailand.
In a regular-sized pick-up truck
Due to all the smoke, the sunset was always a fire orange
Another grandiose plan I had was to take a horse-drawn carriage ride in Lampang and then try again to find some silk. This is real-life, so we wisely scratched that plan and still made it to the hotel barely after sunset.
So amazing! The umbrella making and rice paddy look fascinating.
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