(written by Dave)

The weather forecast called for 70% chance of showers but we got up early, ever the optimists, and discovered only light clouds and even some blue sky.  Woohoo.  We had brekkie in the room and were rolling from the hotel at 7:30.  The route out of town was easy, we had a slight tailwind and the sun was shining.  Life is good.

We had quite a few route changes and navigational challenges today.  We had a choice of taking the main north-south highway, highway 4, or lots of little back roads between the rail line and the ocean.  We’ve read journals that espouse the pros and cons of both.  The highway is straight, has a wide shoulder and requires low navigational skills.  The back roads have limited shoulders and traffic, and require many stops to check the map.  By now, you know that I love finding back roads, so that’s what we did.  Today we travelled roads 3180, 3201, 3253, 3411, 3374 and a couple unnumbered short-cuts that we only found on google maps – they were not on our printed maps.  Overall, a good result, no backtracking required for the entire day!

This part of Thailand has many Buddhist temples.  We stopped for pictures at a couple, skipped some of the others.  They are quite stunning, but you can get temple fatigue – ho-hum, another gilded Buddhist temple to stop and look at.  There was another nice one here in Bang Saphan as well.

And the rain, well in 107ks we rode through exactly 3k of rain.  I know this because at 3k to Pak Khlong it started to absolutely dump.  We are talking walls of water, sheets of rain.  There was no place to stop until Pak Khlong and in 3k we were completely soaked, soggy shoes and wet clothes.  We ducked under the awning of a shop and waited out shower.  It lasted another 15 minutes then it was gone.  We had no more rain for the rest of the day and even road on dry roads just a few k further out of town.  It’s possible that we were “lucky” and it didn’t even rain elsewhere.  Oh well, the wet cooled us off and by the time we reached Bang Saphan we were completely dried out.

We were thinking of staying at the resorts south of town and rode down along the beach to check them out.  The views were nice, but there were few options for eating.  We decided to head into town to a centrally located hotel that we read about on another cyclist’s blog.  The Rama Inn does have a nice location but it’s one of those hotels where you wear your thongs all the time.  We are opening only those bags that are necessary in an attempt to avoid an ant infestation – we’ll see how successful that will be.

We grabbed some fabulous chicken noodle soup for lunch after checking in.  We decided to try eating before showers so that we could have an earlier dinner.  Good plan but it was harder to find a place to eat than we thought it would be.

After lunch, we showered but could not bring ourselves to relax in the room so we headed out for an ice-cream and a look at town.  I found some “Tahoe” cookies/biscuits and an English speaking shop helper who thought taking a photo was a grand idea, see below.  We stalled long enough avoid the hotel before dinner.  We hit the street market just across the rail road tracks for another plate of noodles, this time with seafood.  We wandered  more and eventually gave up and went back to the room.  The bed is hard and we’ve sprayed some insect repellent around the edge of it.  I’m sure that a good night’s sleep will follow.  Nancy is not so sure…

Tomorrow we head for Prachuap Kira Khan.  We have about half the day on back roads and the rest on highway 4.  At some point we pass the narrowest part of Thailand (10k wide).  We’ll post a photo if they have a sign.

For now, we are just focusing on getting through the night in our ‘lovely’ hotel room….

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