Home-but packed and ready for Asia

We were blown back to Stratford by the tornado that hit St. Louis on Good Friday.  On the Thursday night we were on the road, looking for a place to pull off for the night.  We found a WalMart in St. Louis and it became the Booker campsite.  The next morning (Good Friday), the weather wasn't good. It was rainy and just dismal.  We decided not to hang around, but to get on the road and just drive through the rain.  Good thing.  We heard about the tornado that ripped through St. Louis that afternoon, taking out a suburb and part of the airport.

We've spent this week having fun with Lily and Luke, and making sure they remember who we are. 

Trip Recap

Distance travelled: 20560 km
Furthest point from home:  San Diego, at the border toTijuana, Mexico
Most northern extent of travels:  Portland, Oregon
Most western extent of travels:  San Francisco, California
Highest point:  Sequoia National Park-over 9000 ft in elevation.  Height of van roof-8 ft 3in (found this out when we tried to go into an underground parking lot that said the height of the ceiling was 8 ft 2in.  Part of our roof vent is still attached to that ceiling sign.) 
Lowest point:  Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California (282 ft below sea level).  Badwater Basin is also   the hottest and driest spot in North America.  It was cold and it rained the day we were there.
Hottest day-98.8 F.  Hottest point in North America that day.
Coldest day:  Camping in the mountains in Death Valley.  Woke up to snow.  Other campers were in tents, freezing.
Scariest moment:  Driving on the Interstate in California, we experienced a near miss-miss head-on.  We watched a car enter the freeway from an exit ramp.  This car came up the off ramp, directly in front of the car which was exiting the freeway in front of us.  Then, this wayward driver realized that he was going the wrong way so he did a U-turn on the freeway in front of 3 lines of traffic and scooted back down the off ramp.  
Special moments:  first view of The Grand Canyon; hot air balloon ride in Sedona; walking into Mexico; beachcombing on the Pacific; biking across the Golden Gate Bridge; buying shrimp off the shrimp boats and having a shrimp boil; swimming in the Rio Grande.

Next
We're packed and ready for our flight to Hong Kong.  We leave Toronto at 10 am on May3-the flight is 15.25 hours long.  We land in Hong Kong at 1:15 pm their time on May 4. 
We're spending 6 weeks touring Asia, and we have about 2 weeks of that planned out.  For the remaining 4 weeks we're going to bump around Southeast Asia, find interesting places to stay and do things as we find them. 
Here's what we have so far:
Hong Kong-2 days.  Fly to Bangkok.
Bangkok-4 days.  Take the overnight train north to Chiang Mai.
Chiang Mai-8 days.  Attend a Thai cooking class, visit the elephant camp.  Return south on the train to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur-4-5 days.  This is shopping heaven.  We might spend more time here. Al might not realize this.
From Kuala Lumpur we want to go to Bali, Indonesia and then Penang, Maylasia, and back to Thailand to the smaller, out of the way sights.  Perhaps then to Siem Reap, Cambodia.  Who knows? 
Our flight home lands in Toronto, at 6:05 pm on June 16th.

We'll be updating the blog along the way.  All of Asia is very technologically advanced so we'll have internet access.  One of our hotels even gives guests cell phones to use to make local calls.  Sweet!
A&K