You Can’t Always Predict

December 18, 2025

Ban Bo Thong to Phichai

Dear little friends,

Leaving My Home was bittersweet. Khun Mae loaded us up with tiny bananas and normal-sized oranges, we put foot to pedal, and off we went into a beautiful cool morning.

Bruce's new 30 cent color coordinated bungee cord getting acquainted with his old red ones.

We were waiting to eat breakfast until we reached the village near the big Highway 11 (which we were certainly not going to take). I had a promising looking restaurant marked on Google maps, we’d just put our heads down and get there. There were a couple last rolling hills and I remarked to Bruce that we were sort of at a gateway out of the mountains, and it was true. We rolled out into the great central plain of Thailand, and when I say it is enormous, well, go look at a map.

The restaurant I marked wasn’t open. This is not atypical, lots of these places have hours that don’t show up accurately on their Google listings, we’ve seen that over and over. There will be another. And there was. We were greeted at a soup place by a man who could speak some English but his speech was slurred and arhythmic and we decided later that he must have had a stroke. He was very sweet though.

The other people at the restaurant, hm, not so much. This rarely happens but when Bruce went to pay for our noodle soup, even though he had spoken Thai to them and obviously understands the numbers, one of them named one price, and another lady said in Thai, “Naw, charge them a hundred” which is insane for soup and very, very unusual behavior. Bruce paid, we rolled our eyes and our wheels on out of there.

Mind you, the difference in price was only 75 cents, nothing to get your nose out of joint over but it does create a pall in your mind for a few minutes. We rode with our slight pall out into the beautiful rice fields of central Thailand.

It felt so great to ride on non-rolling roads in straight efficient lines! And then, it felt so weird and tiring to ride on non-rolling roads in straight efficient lines! We like farm country, we like rice fields, but somehow my hands were going numb and my butt hurt from all of this monotony. I’m such a complainer! The road we were on was purely through agriculture, very few villages, and villages are where the fun is.

In villages there are old people standing by the road in the morning. I’m not sure what they are doing there but they’re always there. There are dogs who have to decide whether to raise a fuss or keep sleeping off the debauchery of their nights of unfettered dog activities. There are flowers in front of houses and the smell of garlic in the wok. Anyway. It was mostly straight lines through rice in various stages of stubble, cultivation, or growth.

Just another Buddhist roadside attraction.

A couple of times I saw pickup trucks with giant drones in the back, drones that are attached to big tanks of fertilizer or who-knows-what. Combines and tractors and plows pull wads of wet clay onto the road for us to navigate around, keeping us on our toes.

Fortunately for this journal, no matter the monotony, Bruce maintains his curiosity and documentation, stopping for lotus ponds and other, more startling things that I didn’t even notice. The counting of dead snakes on the road carries on.

After the roots of the tapioca plants are dug up the stems are stripped of their leaves and branches and set aside for a few days to rest in the sun! Then the stems are cut into foot long pieces and jammed into the ground. A few days after that they sprout leaves and the new growth period begins.

Quick roadside attraction as we whiz by.

Bruce writing here: I was riding along and out of the corner of my eye this black image emerged and I immediately thought 'ZOMBIE!' I had to turn around and go see if it really was him.

When we finally got to Phichai we were more than ready to call it a day. The town is located on the main railway line, north to Chiang Mai, south to Bangkok. The station seems to be part of the heart of Phichai, the afternoon market is nearby, the cool central roundabout is opposite, it’s a bustling little town.

Downtown Phichai. The town shrine in the middle.

We stopped for iced coffee bolan and yet another ragged fellow with few teeth approached us but this time it was a perfunctory interaction. We do tend to attract those guys and every village seems to have at least one. Some of them are mentally ill or drug addicts or just the village weirdo but it’s daytime, the locals tell them to bug off, and they do. This one did too, and gave us a hearty wave when we passed him a few minutes later.

It’s much warmer now here in the valley and south of where we’ve been. Our goal is to be inside by noon. The first guesthouse we stopped at said that check in was at 1. That gave us time to eat nearby and then find another guesthouse that seemed more shady and cool than the concrete blast of the first one.

A very extensive menu at the restaurant where we ate lunch. Keep in mind that 40 Baht is just over a dollar which is what each of our orders cost.

We rolled down a sketchy looking lane and saw a quasi-deserted row of bungalows. In those moments you assess the situation. Was it indeed deserted? No, the deserted ones have vines growing over them. Was there evidence of people living in them, no, no piles of shoes on the porch or racks of laundry drying. At the far end a woman appeared with a machete. Don’t freak out, she was doing a little landscaping in the noonday sun. She was affable, wearing glasses. All good.

Our tiny room was just fine, we rested in the air conditioning and then went back to town looking for some food. The excellent lunch place was all closed up, surely there would be some restaurants open in bustling little Phichai. Nope. Market closed, nothing but hardware and phone stores open. Some towns just don’t have the necessary prosperity to have evening restaurants and you can’t always predict. What to do?

Why, 7-Eleven of course. We took our food over to the adorable train station and ate there and then hot-footed it back in the dusk to our mysterious guesthouse, which still had no other guests. But there were frogs singing in the rice field immediately out in the back of our bungalow and they kept that up all night long, or at least in the moments I was awake enough to hear them.

Dinner of 7-Eleven toasties taken to be eaten at the pleasant surroundings of the cute Phichai Railway Station.

Today's ride: 30 miles (48 km)
Total: 579 miles (932 km)

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