Wednesday, December 8, 2021
5:38 a.m. Room 3, RETRO Twin Home
Mae Sot, Thailand
The time has finally come to leave Mae Sot and head north. I have no strong reason to delay any longer. Quite a few random things have been happening over the last few days. I did arrange to meet up with Steve. I dropped by his house before we went out for coffee. And that gave me the opportunity to pick up my mosquito net and the SD cards for my camera. At the same time, I talked to Steve about how I’d removed the visor from my helmet. I was wondering if he knew how easy it would be to buy a replacement. To my delight, he came up with a much better solution, and he brought out a much better helmet for me to try. This helmet has a different design in that it covers my ears. The other helmet is more open. I wasn’t sure that I would like this more closed-in helmet. I like the idea of being able to hear and see more. I’m put off, for example, by the full racing helmets that wrap around your entire head. They always seem far too large and restricting. But this helmet is clearly superior to the one I’ve been using all this time. It did cover my ears, but I could still hear the outside world just fine. I might even be able to hear it better, because I no longer had the wind roaring in my ears. And with its tighter fit, the helmet and the visor didn’t catch the wind as much, and it simply was less distracting. There is some odd distortion in the plastic of the visor, but it is much more clear than the old foggy and scratched one. Finally, the chin strap is more user-friendly. It uses a ratchet system, and it is much easier to attach it and cinch it tight. And then it is released by simply lifting up a small lever. I should have been using a helmet like this right from the beginning.
After spending a few minutes at his house, Steve and I rode to BK Coffee and Beer. We hung out there for a while and enjoyed a coffee and a good chat. And then afterwards, Steve suggested we have the scooter looked at before my trip to the north. That seemed like a good idea to me, and we rode to the little shop around the corner from his house. The mechanic replaced the oil and the brake fluid as usual. But he also replaced the brake pads on the front wheel and cleaned up the entire braking mechanism. I’m not sure what else he did, but the final bill, which Steve paid, came to 300 baht, and the scooter ran much better afterwards. The brakes in particular were much more responsive and stronger and smoother. I was very glad we took the time to do this.
Next came my search for a jacket. I really didn’t want to spend a lot of time on this. I visited a kind of budget department store downtown first. It had one orange cotton jacket that was large enough for me. It’s a very strange and old jacket, but it was my only option. The patches on the front and arms indicate that the wearer of the jacket is dancer #90 in the United States Athletic Department. And despite being large enough for me, the brand is a children’s brand. I believe it’s called Smart Dog Children’s Kids. It was missing one snap and had some stains on it. And because of that, they gave me a 30% discount, and the price came to 447 baht. I left it there at first, and I rode to an army surplus outlet. This place looked promising, but none of their jackets were large enough for me. And with the sense that I didn’t want to spend more time on this, I returned to the department store and bought the Smart Dog Dancer jacket. It isn’t like a windbreaker at all. It’s more like a fleece. But, hopefully, it will be enough to keep me warm as I ride in the early morning.
The next day, I returned to the army surplus store. While looking for a jacket, I noticed that they had large piles of pants. I spent an hour or two there going through all their pants and trying on a lot of them, but I couldn’t find a single pair that fit. I guess that’s not surprising, since these were all factory rejects and random one-off items. They didn’t have a full range of sizes for each style. They might have just one pair of a certain style. If the prices were reasonable, I might have taken a chance on one pair and tried to sew it up to make it fit better. But these were technical pants, and they came with a high price tag. The average was around 1,600 baht. For that much money, I wanted to be absolutely sure that the pants would fit. So, I left pantless.
I had a GoPro running for much of this day. This was part of my new effort to make a more casual kind of video that would be faster to complete and post. I’ve gotten frustrated with my efforts to complete the videos from Sukhothai and Kamphaeng Phet. And I decided to just set them aside and start fresh with videos from the scooter trip. I don’t want to fall any further behind. So, I decided to skip ahead in time. In fact, I shot that video yesterday and then I edited it and uploaded it last night. I’m hoping to do more casual types of videos like that during this scooter trip. I will keep working on the Sukhothai videos, but I will post them as I finish them. And they will show up out of sequence. There is nothing I can do about that. And I tried to explain this new approach in my video. I think I’ve just gotten tired of spending full 10-hour days working on an edited video that ends up being partially viewed by 500 people. More than that, I was frustrated with the imbalance in my life. I was spending 90% of my time working on videos. And that left no time to actually be here in Thailand. My goal now is to change the balance. I’m going to focus more on living my life. And I’ll alter my video habits to allow for that. And if that means posting less videos, shorter videos, and more casual videos, then that is what I will do.
The plan for today is to ride to a small town called Tha Song Yang. It is about 86 kilometers away if you follow 105 the whole way there. I spent some time yesterday plotting a possible course through the countryside. This countryside route starts in Mae Ramat.