Leaving for Vietnam in 35 days!

The girls are counting down the days 'til we leave and it is now just 35! We booked a room at the Doubletree by the airport that includes 10 days of parking so we can just drive ourselves to the airport the night before our flight instead of getting up before the crack of dawn to drive to Los Angeles on those gridlocked freeways!





We found a place for our dog to retreat to while we are away. Got lucky that it is with friends instead of a doggie hotel that charges a huge amount!



I also posted a pic of Sophie in her ao dais. As you can see this blog is pretty much my practice time. I have now figured out about posting, uploading photos and now as the next 35 days pass I need to learn how to post video! My goal is to have it pretty well figured out so I can do it quickly while in Vietnam. Never know how long I will have internet access!

We received our Vietnam visas!

We received our passports back with the Vietnam visas inside on Friday, January 11th. That is quick! Now we have everything we need to travel on March 6th. We are going to book a hotel near LAX the night before so we can avoid having to leave our home at the crack of dawn to arrive at the airport. Staying the night before will allow us to get a good night's sleep and take our time getting ready to shuttle to the airport. No matter what the drive is long but doing it the night before makes more sense to us.

We have a Vietnamese lady in town that we know and she is going to make contact with a few people in Vietnam this week. She will iron out some loose ends for us and make things ready for us in Vietnam.

We have lots of gifts we want to give, people we want to help and we have almost a couple of months to try to get it all ready for our journey. Sophie (and her sister, Sadie) are so excited to take this trip - it's a family vacation so of course, it sounds good. But, it is something Sophie just wants and needs and we feel it will be so good for her to experience Vietnam in person instead of through photos/video.

Received passports, now we just need the Vietnam Visa's!

We were pleasantly surprised to get our passports renewed in 10 days, from start to finish! So, today I went to the bank and got a cashier's check and tomorrow we will mail off the passports with visa applications for each of us so we can go to Vietnam.

We were able to book our international flights on United Airlines - although they call it a non-stop, direct flight, it really is not. We must first land in Hong Kong and switch planes and then continue on to HCMC. But it still is better than the other choices. We also went ahead and booked our flights to and from Danang with Pacific Airlines. I was lucky that a nice man from The Door to Vietnam (Vinh) told me about getting these airlines tickets online. I was able to get the information needed in English on this website and USD.

The time will go by quickly so the girls and I plan on getting things ready ahead of time so we dont' forget things at the last minute.

More later....