Tales of Joy 2022 #7

Greetings, dear readers…. From 30,000 feet up in the air!

I realized, in the middle of this 11-hour flight, that there is another Tale to be told, between the Baja and Thailand (where I’ll be, in eighteen more hours en sh’allah). And this is my only chance to write it.

I said goodbye to my sacred spots, took a couple outings with my host family, and taught a few more yoga classes to my “roomies” at the hacienda,

After one final sunrise meditation, Maria drove me to the bus station. And later at noon I took a plane to San Diego.When I arrived at the San Diego airport, I slipped from my dreamy state of ease and equanimity. (Yes, my “splat factor” – the distance from which one can fall, was vast). “Mex” was the car rental agency I had chosen, cause it was the cheapest car available.

Whoops! They were off campus. WAY off campus. I finally found an almost hidden small sign that said, Mex rentals. Call us.

They didn’t answer the phone, repeatedly. Eventually, I walked into the nearby Avis rental office and procured a car, for a fortune!

Soon after arriving “home” at my place in Solana Beach, my beloved friend Nawng-Joy called me from Thailand.

She had been doing all the research into how I gain entrance into Thailand. It was absurdly complicated and expensive. And Spirit was very clear,

Yes. You WILL do all of this.

So at four in the afternoon, I gulped and began the application process for my Thailand Pass, as it’s called. It involved:
…..special medical insurance, two hotel reservations in Bangkok, COVID testing before departure, another immediately after arrival, descriptions of every vaccination in detail, plus many jpg of every document.

Coyote Trickster was intent on gobbling my every effort. The entire form kept vanishing before my eyes. I started completely over TEN times, assuming that the problem was somehow due to my own tragic incompetence.

Eleven hours later, I finished.

I discovered the next day that the Internet had been extremely haywire all that day and night, and even techies were pulling their hair out.

Eight hours later, I called the hotel manager in Bangkok (at midnight), trying to figure out how to make a jpg. of my reservation. that I could drag onto the form.

This Thailand Pass might have been simple for some of you readers, especially the millennials . But as a technophobe, terror and adrenaline accompanied me throughout the night.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life

At 3 a.m. I had scaled every mountain, multiple times, and completed the application. Half an hour later, I got my acceptance from the Thai government. It was 1 p.m. there.

My sister Leslie, whom I’ve talked and laughed with every day since her stroke, was an incredible cheerleader the first five hours, before she went to bed. The next morning, when I announced my successful completion, she said

This is a watershed moment for you…

Correct. Leslie has watched me recoil and retreat from technological glitches for half a century. I told her:

Being with the whales had something to do with it.

Isn’t life fascinating?

Click Here to Read/download the full newsletter #6 from Joy (with more of the Tale from San Diego, LA, Toyko and Bangkok!)