November 7, 2025
Maybe We’ll Eat There Someday
Lamphun to Chiang Mai
Dear little friends,
Bruce wasn’t doing so good last night so I worried about him being able to bike back to Chiang Mai but this morning he was fairly perky and ready to go. We were in no rush to leave, however, so got to spend more time yakking with Kitt and having one more cup of coffee.
After so much off-and-on rain, we had a forecast of NONE, and in fact the sun was peeking out and it looked to be a lovely day back to Chiang Mai. And of course we were going to take the tall tree highway again, there wasn’t even a discussion.
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There’s not much to be said about this ride, to be honest. It’s a fun road and we love it. The tall tree section is about 8 miles of the 17 and it’s just a treat to see how the trees are cared for. People were out raking up the leaves and making everything spiffy. The first ten or eleven miles are all nice new asphalt with a smooth narrow shoulder. The last bit is pretty awful, with a very rough and unpredictable shoulder, much of which humps over the tree roots so there is a lot of mirror-glancing to see what would be worse, veering around the root hump and possibly under the wheels of a vehicle, or taking the hump and having it hurl you under the wheels of a vehicle.
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I’m exaggerating the danger here, honestly. We were riding slowly and motorbikes and cars were giving us plenty of room, often slowing way down until they could pass us safely.
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When we rode down to Lamphun the other day you may recall that we debated crossing the road to eat soup from a place we remembered from 3 years ago. So we didn’t eat much breakfast in anticipation of stopping there this time. Well, boo, while many many soup and restaurant joints were hopping along Dipterocarpus Way, this one was all wrapped up and closed for the holiday! Such grave disappointment!
A ways down the road we stopped at a moo khrab place, moo khrab is fried crispy pork and sometimes it can be grossly fatty, but this was not, our dishes were lovely. The restaurant itself was very much on the funky side, very rudimentary. Later on Bruce found it on the map and wrote up a nice review, but when I clicked on that location (the name of it was in Thai) I was not convinced he had the right place at all. So maybe some random restaurant got a puzzling review yesterday. It’s all good. Maybe we’ll eat there someday.
There’s a LOT of Chiang Mai we’ve never been in, so it was time to find a new route to our hotel south of the moat and we crossed a bridge over the Ping River and angled our way up. All new territory is fun, and of course we are scoping out interesting places to eat and markets and such.
By the time we arrived it was pretty hot so we cooled our jets in the hotel lobby, catching the occasional breeze and watching the inflatable swan blow around the swimming pool. Our bikes are stashed in the rear of the building near the staff toilets and some indescribable storage areas. To get a complete picture of any location in Thailand you want to see the storage area because the level of random is off the Randomness Index charts.
Our hotel is what you call ‘undistinguished’ and I’ll leave it at that.
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Dinner was khao man gai (chicken rice) by the South Gate and we popped in to 7-11 for ice cream. I didn’t think Bruce would be able to eat his with his extremely sensitive tooth but he soldiered one down. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll be back on the icy life-saving drinks again.
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2 months ago
Today's ride: 17 miles (27 km)
Total: 56 miles (90 km)
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| Comment on this entry | Comment | 6 |
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