Day 145: Welcome to SOSOFT: Society of Stalkers of the Frugal Traveler

It's been a big day of big Matthews.

We left our ghettofabulous "resort," and found out that it's approximately 20 seconds away from a perfect Thailand beach. We now love it here, and are staying an extra day.

Claire found this out in style this morning, as she viewed said beaches from the bike of none other than Matthew Perry. That's right...the infamous Santa Barbara transplant who is actually a reincarnation of the other infamous recently wed Santa Barbaran (our friend), Trent (who is in this picture, which is tiny, and we are sorry). Removed as we are from U.S. pop culture and one of our favorite television shows, Claire actually spent entirey too many minutes during her conversation with this person trying to figure out why this name sounded familiar. (And why he seemed to be acting so Trentish, but that all relates back to heavily fogged in nature of Santa Barbara, as Trent has kindly explained to us over the years.) Happily, as an English teacher, the big Matthew Perry (6'5" he says, if he is not lying) reminded Claire's US Weekly-less self about dear, dear Chandandler Bong and, of course, led her to working wifi.

BUT this was, in fact, the less exciting of our two brushes with fame today. The second, and we feel more internationally exciting (sorry Trentish Matthew) was our acknowledgement and general pleasing email from none other than The Frugal Traveler himself, Matthew Gross. In what seemed to be a mass email of SPAM like we get from our blog's gmail account, we were greeted (via the email subject line): "Welcome to SOSOFT: Society of Stalkers of the Frugal Traveler." Apparently, even if you are big and famous NY Times writer like Matthew Gross you still google yourself sometimes, find weird little girls named Lara and Claire who are stalking you without you knowing it, and take the time to (gasp) write them and (second gasp here) say that if they are in New York they can stop by for lunch.

We do want to warn you, Matthews plural (Gross and Perry), that you should be careful what you offer because we take people up on offers. Because, if you are a frequent reader of this blog, you know that we have nothing else to do. In sum, we are pleased with ourselves. Matthew Gross is extremely cool...traveling the world and writing about it (as you all know we love) but doing so for an actually high profile-type newspaper. And frugally...even the word itself makes Claire's little heart beat a mite bit faster.

Sigh...

Life is good in Thailand. Beach, fame, and wifi from which you can gchat with Claire on the opposite side of the beach...

P.S. To go along with the whole theme of "traveling" and "writing" (an emerging theme on this blog, Sherlock) we have officially put up our favorite travel books on this blog (see the pretty sidebar things!) so that you caould link really quickly to buy them at Amazon if you had lots of spare money to throw around. This is one of those things that official sponsor-filled blogs do, and so we are copying them, because we are officially duh duh duh...**looking for sponsors**... At least you might just want to link to verify that the links work, because it was us, and it was HTML, and, well, you know. If we find out that Matthew Gross has some famous travel book we have never heard of, we'll put that (or another one you or we really like) up to.