Phuket... part 1

So we took our first trip to Thailand and aside from a bit of turbulance (I cringed, Ella and Joel were indifferent) we had a spectacular time! Different from our usual vacations of seeing everything there is to see and planning each minute of our days abroad, we left our travel book at home (ok, truth be told we forgot it) and only saw a couple of the "sights". We never hopped into a taxi (we rode an elephant), we slept in (the one day we didn't have a 3:30am wakeup call to get to the airport), had great meals (even if they all were at the same restaurant) and made friends with the locals (ok, the tailor who made our clothes.)