It's Sunday, so that means it's time for another long bike ride with Chris. The main point of today's ride (other than the usual exercise and exploration) was to visit the home of my friends Stephen and Jit in Phra Pradang before they head back to the US this week.
Ronald McDonald gave us a good luck wai as we started our ride at J-Avenue on Thong Lo and headed towards the Chao Phraya River. We then turned to the south and rode along the river on Thanon Rot Fai Gao (Old Train Road) to the Sanphawut Pier, and then crossed over to Phra Pradang on a ferry.
We then made our way over to the small community that Jit's family has lived in for generations, and had a very nice chat with them. On this trip to Thailand, Steve and Jit did a "Holy Tour" of India and visited where Buddha was born, where he died, and where he gave particular sermons. They then went on a Buddhist tour of Laos. And Jit even ordained as a nun for a while. So it was very interesting to hear of their adventures over the past several weeks.
After our chat, we were feeling pretty good, so we decided to take the long way home: Through Pra Pradang, down Rat Burana to Charoen Nakorn, then over the river at Sapan Taksin and then Sathorn to Rama 4 and back to the Thong Lo area. It was a total of almost exactly 50 kilometers. Whew! The good news is that I feel much better after this week's ride than last weeks, so maybe my exercise regimen is starting to pay off.
I just uploaded some pictures from the ride that I snapped with my iPhone (like this one of Steve and Jit), and here is a Google Map of our route with a few pictures I took along the way:
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