A New Year's Resolution

I'm not gay (laughing), with that said, I have seen some very good looking, uh, guys. Okay, go ahead and laugh. You see, toward the end of this past summer (August 2011), my wife and I visited an old friend of mine in Pattaya, Chon Buri, Thailand. He's a former Navy Seal. I'm a former Army Ranger assigned to SOG when we met and never mind how we met, that operation may still be classified even though it's been more than thirty years since then. Anyway, my wife was feeling rather confined. A retired police officer, she'd gotten used to running the roads, so to try to cure her "need for speed," I suggested that we take a road trip and, to make her feel better, she could drive. However, about that time, I got an e-mail from a former partner saying that I still had an open invitation to come visit. With his job, he couldn't leave the country and his company wouldn't give him time off nor release him from his current contract without a considerable financial penalty. He added that Pattaya is a coastal town and has several very good eateries. I remembered my TDY trips to Thailand when I was in the service and the delicious seafood. A couple of weeks later, my wife and I were on a flight to Bangkok.

It took us around twenty hours of flying, with a refueling stop, to get us there. I tried to figure out the time differentials, but all I got was confused. What I finally came up with is that they're twelve hours ahead of us . . . or behind us and, after twenty hours of flight, we got there eight hours or so after we'd left – according to the clock. My watch said differently. My old partner picked us up at the airport in – get this – a chauffeured company limousine. We were duly impressed. And nearly had heart attacks – three of them – on the way down to Pattaya. If any of you have ever driven in Italy or even New York, you may have a small idea of what that drive was like, because it was easily ten times more frightening. By the time we got to his home, my right arm, on which my wife had kept a death grip, was ready to fall off.