Answering questions....

We have enjoyed talking to people about our trip and there have been some common questions. Here's the questions and our thoughts.....

Why did you decide to pick Southeast Asia to travel?
Well, we had planned on taking a long vacation this summer, and so we started to think where would we want to go that’s pretty far away? Mark has travelled to Thailand and really enjoyed it, and I have always wanted to go too. We also thought about New Zealand and Australia, but decided to just do Southeast Asia.
We then added other countries in the area – like Vietnam and Cambodia. We have had friends that went there recently and said it’s pretty great, and we wanted to get to the areas before they become even more developed (and more expensive).

How did you plan the trip? Did you use a travel agent?
My wonderful husband planned the whole trip. He loves to research and spent a lot of time talking to other friends about their travels, researched things on the internet and Tripadvisor, and we combined our personal interests into a basic itinerary. He consulted a travel agent for some flights in and out of the countries in Southeast Asia, but ended up booking all the flights himself. The greatest part was that we used airline miles to get there and back and used our Starwood hotel points for most of the nights on the trip.
We had all of the flights and hotels booked before we left, but then just planned out our days once we got there. We had some general ideas of what we wanted to do (cooking class in Thailand, certain historical/religious sites, etc), but if something looked interested, then we did it.

What’s it like being back?
It is really strange. We had a bit of a culture shock when we returned. We had a couple days when we got back to regroup, do laundry, relax and set our bodies to the new time clock. But now that it’s over 6 weeks since we’ve returned, it seems like the trip was years ago. Weird.

Anything else?
I would want to highly recommend the company Blurb.com for a photobook! This was our first time using this company, but it definitely won’t be the last. We created this amazing 160 page book with dust jacket, hard cover, and full bleed color images of our trip. There are over 300 images and the book was about 50 bucks to make. It’s totally a coffee-table type of book and is way cheaper than sending your pictures to a Costco or something like it.