The Atlanta hotel on Sukhumivit Soi 2 turned out to be a hotebed for BootsnAll members. Sean and I met up with Amy and Juan from San Francisco who are on a month long trip to Thailand.

The following night we met up with Erica, also from San Fran who is doing a solo RTW trip for a year.

She had e-mailed Sean and I called her from a pay phone to arrange dinner. We all met up in the Atlanta dining room and chatted about travel and Thailand. � Uncle Bill� told wild stories of his time here and I think Erica was wide eyed taking it all in.

After dinner everybody had different plans and I said I wanted to check out a new looking place called Gulliver�s Tavern on Soi 5. Erica joined me and we sipped a drink while checking out the scene on our bar stools. Erica often gets mistaken for a local and I said just for fun we should pretend I had just picked her up.

Erica has done study abroad programs before including one in Florence. She has the urge to do fashion design and I asked her opinions on local fashion. She said that a lot more girls in Thailand wear skirts and heels, where as in the US flatter shoes are the norm.

I asked her how her parents came to terms with her decision to travel solo. She said because she has studied overseas and the fact that her dad worked for United Airlines meant travel is quite accepted in her family.

Gulliver�s Tavern is a huge place inside and looks like a modern American brew pub with nice furniture, plenty of wood work and smartly dressed staff. At the rear is an area that has been designed to look like the outside courtyard, but its actually inside.

Erica will be heading up to Chiang Mai and I�m going to set her up with my friend Brianna who lives there�.great to have contacts.