Da Nang at last.

We're here.  In Da Nang, in our guest rooms where we will stay until we find an apartment.  Phew.  We made it!

We knew getting here would be an adventure--we've been saying all along that we were making this huge life change because we wanted a family adventure.  Well, the funny thing about adventures is that they require unplanned, unexpected things to happen.  If everything goes according to plan, you might be having a good time, but you aren't having an ADVENTURE.

We had a wonderful final day in the USA, seeing Wicked in Portland, eating at the Spaghetti Factory with good friends (goodbye, American food!) and driving up to Seattle where another good friend met us at the airport to hang out during our late night check-in.  All of this was wonderful, planned, and expected.

Then the adventures began!  We got up to the check-in desk with our mass of luggage and were pleased that all of our bags weighed in at the expected amounts (slightly lighter than the international flight required so that we wouldn't be overweight for the domestic flight in Vietnam.).  Tim had packed and weighed and adjusted and re-weighed (again and again) with precision accuracy.



We had loaded our carry-on bags with everything we anticipated needing for the first two weeks so we wouldn't even need to open those heavy big suitcases until we were settling in to our apartment.  After the airline attendant finished putting baggage claim stickers on all our bags, she asked us to weigh our carry-ons.  What?  Weigh the carry-ons?  This was new.  And not good.  Every one of our our carry-on bags was significantly heavier than the 7 kg allowance.  So, there at the check-in desk at midnight, we pulled things out of our lovely rectangular rolling carry-on bags and stuffed them willy-nilly into each piece of checked luggage that could still take some weight.  Stuffing, weighing, re-stuffing, re-weighing.  I think we spent 45 minutes checking in.  And once we left there and went to the security check, we had the lightest carry-on bags I have ever traveled with in my life!



Nothing else eventful happened for about 12 hours.  Just some tossing and turning and trying to get comfortable enough to sleep on the plane, eating meals at strange hours and watching in-flight movies. Then about an hour before we were supposed to land, our pilot told us we were being re-routed to Hong Kong because of turbulent weather around Taipei.  Typhoon hits Taipei, Taiwan: appreciate the terrific T's...

We landed in Hong Kong about the same time we would have landed in Taipei, and we sat in the plane outside the airport awaiting a change in the weather.  About every hour or so our pilot would make an announcement that the storm was still in progress.  This happened for FIVE HOURS!  Have you ever been on a plane for 17 hours that you thought you'd be on for only 12 hours?  It's pretty exciting.  There's nothing quite like sitting on a plane that isn't even flying.  It's pretty fun to be a flight attendant on a plane that's been sitting on the tarmac for an extra 5 hours, too.  They just kept bringing us snacks and water because they were so glad to have the extra time with us.

Finally it was determined that our flight would be clear to go after another two hours, so we were given meal vouchers and allowed to get off the plane to get our own lunches in the airport.  I'm sorry to say that we, the Chases, lovers of Asian foods, spent our meal vouchers in the Hong Kong airport eating Popeye's Chicken.  You can ask me why if you want the whole story, but just know that we apologize.

When the time came to re-board our plane for the flight to Taipei, it was like coming back to an old friend.  The flight attendants felt that way, too.  Landing in Taipei was quite an accomplishment, and the still-turbulent weather above made for some stomach-tickling turbulence that the kids found delightful.  We got off the plane with a feeling of triumph and were greeted by about 30 EVA Air employees smiling and handing us each a gift bag with a tin of biscuits in it.  It's amazing how a tin of biscuits can erase all the inconveniences of a long-delayed flight.  It was now about 4:00 in the afternoon, and we were told that our flight to Saigon would leave at 10:00 pm.  We were given meal vouchers again and set off to explore another Asian airport.



We were pretty dazed and groggy by this point, so it took a long time to figure out what was strange about this airport (aside from the creatively-themed waiting rooms and abundance of artificial plants attached to walls and ceilings everywhere).  Normally, if you are someone with a really long lay-over, you find a place to hang out and watch the ebb and flow of people coming through the airport.  A flight arrives and hundreds of people walk by.  A flight leaves and a gate empties out.  The hall is crowded, the hall is empty.  People are coming and going.  But when an airport was closed for half a day because of a typhoon, thousands and thousands of people are in limbo in that airport.  Long-overdue flights were finally coming in, but not enough flights were yet able to leave.  Multiple flights were directed to the same gate to wait, and no one could really say which flight was going to leave first.  Every restaurant had a crazy-long line, and most people standing there were holding airline-supplied meal vouchers.  In fact, many of the restaurants were running out of food.  I must apologize again, because the Chase family spent the bulk of our food voucher coupons at Starbucks.  But we did get a banana-guava juice and a watermelon-milk-drink at a kiosk first.

I'll spare you all the groggy details, but our flight didn't leave at 10:00.  There were gate changes.  There were two flights to LA that left first, both from our gate.  There were irate passengers, loudly yelling at the 20-year-old female gate clerk, who clearly bore the fault of the typhoon and all its airport-chaos aftermath. There were uncomfortable chairs and fluorescent lights.  But what I really want to tell you is that we have the most amazing children in the whole world.  This travel "day" I'm describing probably sounds like a nightmare, but we felt really pretty good the whole time.  The kids were calm and collected.  They didn't fight.  They didn't complain.  They just rolled with it.  Gold stars for everyone!

At 5:45 am, 24 hours after we had landed in Hong Kong, we left the Taipei airport, on a plane bound for Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).  The ending of the journey was really pretty anti-climactic.  Nothing interesting happened on that final flight.  Nothing interesting happened when we got our visas or went through customs.  I tell ya, if there's ever a part of your journey you hope is really boring, it's the going through customs part!

I'll have the kids write their first impressions of Asia and give you a more poetic telling of our arrival, but for now I'm just trying to get the sequence out because it's how the story begins.  We can tell you about the lovely pool at our hotel and our duke-it-out fight with jetlag.  We can tell you about our first-ever business-class flight from Saigon to Da Nang on Monday, and what it felt like to be in our city for the first day.  Tuesday we'll go looking at houses with our realtor, and we'll make sure to add more pics next post.

Love,
The Chases