October 6,

We got up at 0430!!! We had to to catch our first of two flights today. It is going to be a long day! We will end up in Vietnam for our “Take Two”. Jeff E-hailed a grab at 0507, and we were on our way to the airport by 0515. By 0630, we were checked in and plopped in the lounge of Penang's airport. We had our javas – Jeff a milk tea and milo mix, mee aaa trripple shottt of Americanooo which left me super caffinated – tooo mucchhh!

Anyway, we went to our gate and boarded the plane by 0730. At 0743 the plane backed up, 3 minutes late. We now had our breakfast on the plane of scrambled eggs with a sausage, spoonful of potatoes, and mixed veggies; yogurt; roll & butter; fruit slices. It was decent for airplane food. The flight was okay. It is the first time we have flown on Cathay Pacific.
The plane landed at 1121 (so 3.5″ish” hour flight) in Hong Kong. We have a four hrs – plus – lay over. So we found one of five lounges we have priviledges in – Plaza Premium Lounge. At 1155 we are signed in the lounge. It has a limit of two hours… soo we will be doing some lounge hopping. We both ate lightly having some ginger rice; a veggie spring roll; some steam fish small wraps (sushi bite-size); sauteed red sweet potatoes with cherry tomatoes; and a barley corn tossed salad. Pretty good, decent, healthy lunch. We each had a glass of wine also. We left before our two hours expiration– I think by 1340.

We still have over three hours, so Jeff looked up another lounge we could use – The Chase Sapphire Lounge. We got signed in here. There is a noticeable step up in quality in this lounge. What a blessing or perk these lounges have been, because once inside all food and drink stuff is free. The quality is also usually fairly good to great across the board, but like I said this one is a step better than the prior one and significantly better than others. We sampled some more food, having a most wonderful Smoked Duck Breast and Pear Salad; some Cheese and Water(?) Crackers; and Kalamata Olives that we sampled. There was other stuff – including a whole menu you could scan for hot stuff, but we were full. We left this lounge at 1615 “ish” and went to our gate that was boarding. This gate was part of eight or nine gates that was in a satellite terminal – we had to go up three long escalators and cross part of the runway that planes go under to get to other gates… Kind of wild!

By 1632, we were in our seats on plane, thought we were close to the last ones onboard… but someone came on around 1648 or 1649. The plane backed out at 1703 – 13 minutes late – but we sat backed up from the gate for like another 10 minutes! I don't know what that was about. Finally, we started taxiing and took off at 1726. Anyway, we had another in flight meal – of chicken and rice and a bottle of water. We saw a different sunset — above the clouds. The airplane touched down at 1758. We had crossed a time change zone – we went back one hour. So flight time was 90 minutes.

Welcome to Vietnam… take two!! We are in Northern Vietnam this time – Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam!

We get through immigration, collect our bags, and find our prebooked taxi guy by 1840. He gets us through the hustle and bustle of Hanoi, about a 40 minute drive, to… close to our place. We were at the street, but it was blocked to car traffic! So he stopped right there in the street and let us out. The cars behind us were honking, but there was nowhere for him to pull over. So we unload and had to walk the half a block with our rolling luggage to our place – fighting through the congestion of pedestrians and scooters on the road moving around parked scooters on the sidewalk and the road.

Wowza – welcome back to the craziness of Vietnam-no-rules traffic. We navigated to VietHome, our place for four nights, and up to our room, by 1940. I called my mom. At 2200 we linked with our church back home then bed crashing by 2230!