Ayuthaya:

December 11, 2006

Last night we decided to wait for the 0630 breakfast included in the price of the room. We wheel our loaded bikes one at a time in the elevator and park them in the lobby by the front door. There were more people staying in the big hotel than we had thought. There are "Asian" and "American" breakfast buffets. We took a little from each; fried egg, fruit, small slices of french toast, baguette sliced bread and jam, coffee and juice. Well worth the wait.

We are on the road by 0710 an hour later than usual. We get to the main road and instead of going around for a U-turn, we push our bikes up over the grass and hedging to the median and soon we are going in the right direction. The road is flat and again we have a head wind until the road changes angles, and we get a crosswind. The last stretch we have a bit of a tail wind. We find our way to the PU Guesthouse at about 1030-1100. Patrick shuttles the gear to the room, but when he takes his bike, the lady at the front desk says, "No bike in the room, I keep place clean, you don't have to stay here." Patrick comes back out and a boy shows him where he could store the bike; Patrick goes to check out 2 other guesthouses and comes back saying this really is the nicest room for the value. The boy again shows us a place for the bikes, and we agree to stay. Later, the lady tried to make amends, Patrick had told her earlier she wasn't very friendly.

At 4, we meet in the lobby for a boat trip to 3 Wats. There's about a dozen of us that pile into the back of a pickup truck for the ride to the boat. We go along the river and stop at the 3 wats, about 20minutes at each and at 6pm end up at the night market. We eat Pad Thai and Fried Mussels! Then we try to figure out what's next and a ride back to the guesthouse. We were standing with a few of the others when the boy from the guesthouse waves to us and we all pile into a tuk-tuk with him driving--a crazy ride back to the hotel.

Cyclist will do anything to not have to double back

Today's ride: 63 km (39 miles)
Total: 2,893 km (1,797 miles)

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