Ben, Scooby, Greg, Sam and Lee each paid about $6,000 to Thailand Romance Tours for an all-inclusive trip in which women were the main attraction. It wasn’t sex tourism -- more like a game show where willing Thai women were matched up with American men who no longer loved women of their own culture.
Each of the five men journeyed back to Thailand in recent months to finalize immigration papers for their new wives, about a year and a half after first being hooked up with the Thai bachelorettes.
“We get along real good,” 60-year-old Scooby says about his 36-year-old wife, Kid, who's playing housewife and helping take care of Scooby’s daughter, who has cerebral palsy, while she waits for her green card and permission to work. “Kid and my daughter are two peas in a pod. They both like to bust my chops.”
A scientist named Ben from the East Coast who went along on the trip with Scooby was more used to women busting his furniture and breaking his heart than he was them busting his chops. But now he thinks that his history of bad relationships has finally come to an end with his new wife, Boom, who left Thailand with him in the second week of October.
“We make a nice family; we all feel kind of complete because we are a family. It's got a nice rhythm to it; we’re real pleased with it. We’ve snapped probably 10,000 photos in the past six months,” Ben says of the addition of Boom and her child.
And while love and marriage have Sammy and Yuvaree content up in Washington state, where they've been living happily ever after since Yuvaree moved in, the couple is plotting a possible move to Thailand, where they may even start their own school.
Another Thailand love tourist, Greg, has had his wife home in Ohio since January. She came with her son, who’ll be starting kindergarten in the fall. In the meantime, the family has spent a lot of time at the racetrack. Greg and his wife even met up with their matchmaker, Richard, when they went to check out the Indy 500 earlier this year.
The lone tourist from Colorado, Bobby, is also the only one who didn’t find a bride. Bobby has been back to Colombia for sex trips a couple of times since returning from Thailand but has no plans to get married or go back to Thailand anytime soon.
Thailand Romance Tours, meanwhile, is still offering its tours. --Luke Turf
