The Road to Udon Thani

Lance, using my computer bag as a booster seat.

 My travel to Thailand was pretty painless. Pretty eclectic as far as airlines. Below see Flat Lance, my buddy from Mary Greeley Medical Center. Lance is enjoying an upgrade to business class on the Delta Flight from MSP to JFK. No Scotch for you, Lance! He didn't come out of the bag again until our third day in Udon Thani.

I met the rest of the party at JFK and got checked in to Cathay Pacific. I had no trouble in transit, but Traci Shogren-Knaak, the anesthesiologist from Ames whom I recruited,had a horrible run-around. Her flight from Des Moines was cancelled, the second flight (to Chicago) was late, she barely made a flight to New York but had to take a cab from La Guardia to JFK. She caught a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong but didn't meet up with her luggage for several days.  The entire crew met up in Hong Kong and we arrived in Bangkok together, fresh and rested after a twenty-plus hour trip.

One of our huge carts of luggage.

   In Bangkok we switched from Cathay Pacific to Thai Air. This involved pushing several carts piled high with luggage from the international arrival area to domestic departures. While one of the carts was being pushed up an escalator ramp, I watched with concern as my checked bag flipped off an over-loaded cart and fell two stories. Fortunately no one was hurt by the falling bag. The only item I was worried about was the Leica field glasses, but a week's worth of scrub suits and underwear were sufficient padding.

Beautiful Bangkok Airport, wasted on glassy-eyed Americans.

One of the institutions sponsoring our missions was Bangkok Hospital, a chain of hospitals in Thailand similar to Kaiser or Catholic Health in USA. It so happens that the CEO of BH also owns Bangkok Air. The current chief of medicine for BH is a retired general, the former surgeon general for Thailand. Consequently, our flight to Udon Thani was held for us and we had a military escort from the airport in Udon Thani to our hotel. We had a senior enlisted man making sure the junior enlisted took good care of our gear, doing a much better job than we did in at the airport in Bangkok.