Good morning Vietnam!!!!!!

After two frenetic weeks of planning, purchasing and packing, we did a speed version of Thanksgiving dinner with Michael and Laura on Wednesday, and left Thursday afternoon at 3:00 (Thanksgiving day) for Newark Airport. We knew this would be a long trip, but assumed we were finally on our way until much to our surprise, the ticket agent said she had no record of our reservatios in spite of the fact we had paper tickets in hand. A half hour of calls to our travel agent cleared things up. However, our ticket victory was short lived when the agent then informed us she couldn't check our luggage through to Hanoi since our flight from Taipei to Hanoi had been cancelled. The prospect of having to claim our 4 very heavy pieces of luggage in San Francisco, and then again in Taipei did not make us happy campers, but with no options, we proceeded to the gate.

We were confirmed Newark to San Francisco, and SFO to Taipei but we had no guarantee of how, or when we would be getting to Hanoi from Taipei. Nevertheless, we got on the plane (I think it was the original A319 Airbus ever built) and 6 hours later landed in San Francisco. Collecting our luggage, we rushed to the EVA Air agent and thankfully found they had cleared 2 seats on a flight from Taipei to Hanoi on Viet Nam airlines for us. Fourteen hours later we landed in Taipei, and then on to Hanoi. Only glitch was our luggage never made the Hanoi connection. Not a trivial problem, since beyond having lived in the same clothes for 24 hours, all our orphanage donations, nanny gifts, and everything we needed to sustain Sophia Rose for her first 2 weeks with us were in the lost luggage. Assured it would arrive the next day, we headed to our hotel and to the beginning of our time in Vietnam.

It's now quite late Sunday night, and since we have an early morning (and much awaited) trip to the orphanage, we'll save some of the details on our first 2 days in Hanoi for a later post. In the meantime, following are just a few pix from our first glimpse of this most amazing city.