Almost There!

We're into the home stretch here. A week from now, we'll be on a plane leaving Frankfurt, Germany for Doha, Qatar. There, we'll change planes and head to Ho Chi Minh City. Each karate or kendo class comes now with a "this is my last (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday) class for two months!" The head karate instructor has set Don the challenge of bringing back video of his doing his latest form in a jungle, on a beach, in a Viet Cong tunnel, or on a rock (the name of the form translates as "crane on a rock"). I don't know about the tunnel, but we should be able to score the other three locales.

Last week, we trekked to Washington, DC through the sleet and got our visas glued and stamped into our passports. We'll also need visas for Cambodia should we end up able to visit Angkor Wat, but all the guide books and websites say that we can get these at the airport when we land as long as we have passport photos and US dollars with us. We all have hostel cards now, and the sons have their International Student ID cards. I think the husband still needs to get the sons their adult scuba diver cards in the event we decide to try to go diving in Vietnam. It's supposed to be easy to exchange their youth cards for adult ones, but we'll see.

This morning, I sprayed two pairs of my pants, one hat, and four pairs of socks with Permethrin, an insect repellent for use on clothing. Tomorrow, I'll do another pair of pants, another hat, another few pairs of socks, and two shirts. With the exception of some time in Cambodia, we won't be in areas that offer an extremely high risk of malaria, but since mosquitos have always seemed to love me, I figured some extra protection couldn't hurt. On the recommendation of the Travel Clinic docs, we're each taking multiple tubes of 33 percent DEET and will be re-applying it often. I may actually get used to the smell by the time we're leaving in April.

A family meeting is on tap for tonight. We need to map out a general itinerary for the Norway leg of the trip so that I can visit our friendly neighborhood travel agent tomorrow and get some Eurail passes. We will definitely spend some days in Oslo, probably at the end of our time there since the husband and I will be flying back from there. We'll definitely spend some time in Trondheim where the husband has multiple cousins who also own a mountain cottage we might be able to visit, weather permitting. There are a few more days to fill up, though, so it's been suggested (yeah, by yours truly) that we take a why-the-hell-not side trip similar to the one that took us to Hyder, Alaska some years ago. Eight or nine hours by train north of Trondheim is Bodo, Norway, which offers among other things the chance to be able to say we've been north of the Arctic Circle. It's not clear that we could take advantage of some of the outdoor activities Bodo offers - glacier hiking, dog sledding, etc. - since April is a very iffy month in terms of it might be like winter or it might be like spring so who knows what we can do when then. But there's a certain attraction to being able to say that we went from the tropics of Southeast Asia to north of the Arctic Circle and, hopefully, didn't suffer too much in the process.

On the home front, we have hired neighborhood kids to walk the family dog, the job I most worried about filling. The dog is almost 13 years old and still loves a good walk almost every day, so making him sit at home for two months would not be a good thing. Some other neighborhood kids will be looking after the lawn and the garbage can that has to be rolled up a hill to the road once a week. I'm working on a list of details for my mother, who will be taking care of the animals, plants, and everything else we hold dear here. I had a friend say that when she and her husband retired and started traveling, she'd be coming to me for advice on what to do to prepare for an extended absence. Right now, my goal is to make the last couple of days here next week as calm and relaxing as possible. Stay tuned to this blog to see if I succeed.

Small Rules!

The netbooks have arrived and are, quite frankly, pretty damned sweet. Here's how mine,an Acer Apire One, compares to a standard trade paperback. They're light, too, weighing about 2.5 pounds. They'd be lighter if we had opted for ones with a much smaller solid-state drive, but we got 160GB hard drives to allow for photo storage.

After a short "name Jean's netbook" contest on Facebook, I have christened mine Pinky Tuscadero in homage to Happy Days. I must say that she is quite sweet. I took her to Florida this past weekend and got some curious and envious stares from people in airport terminals sitting there with full-sized netbooks. I think one person thought I was using a portable DVD player until they noticed I was typing. I had no problems with battery life thanks in part to younger son telling me that battery life would be longer if I toggled the wireless switch to the off position.

The closest I can come to a complaint is actually my own doing. I chose a netbook to travel light, and travel is lighter without an external mouse. I've never been a fan of touchpads, but then I've never really tried to use one. I have so far refused to introduce Pinky to a mouse; she's probably stereotypically female enough to be scared of one. It's a bit awkward at times, but I must be adapting because I found myself using the touchpad on Mr. Mac the other day even when he had his external mouse ready, willing, and able to be used.

Totally apart from netbooks, the list of things remaining to be done is getting shorter. The last two bags are ordered, along with another bottle of Permethrin, an insecticide that can be used to treat clothing. A weekend trip to Walmart or the equivalent should yield sunscreen and extra batteries for the one digital camera that doesn't have a permanent, rechargeable battery. I've put Netflix on hold as well as the Gevalia coffee delivery I used to get a new coffeemaker last fall. The gym membership is also on hold; it was handy that the husband and I are gone exactly two months. I've also started weighing various items of clothing. You laugh, I'm sure, but I'm trying to take the lightest amount of clothing possible since it appears we will be fitting 50 t-shirts into our luggage to distribute to the students and faculty at the university there. (It was going to be 75 shirts until I pointed out that the other professor going over take the 25 shirts intended for his students.) And hey! Weighing clothes enable me to say authoritatively that it may well be that your clothes and shoes can add five pounds to your weight.

Other trip points of interest ... I am taking seven books along. Harry Potter y la camera secreta (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in Spanish) will go in my carry-on. In the suitcase will go used copies of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Ender's Game, and American Gods. The Tolkien books and Ender are from the used bookstore and will be left behind. I also have novels written by a couple of friends on my hard drive. If I still need more to read, there's always Project Gutenberg.

Finally (for this post), we'll be heading to Washington next week to get visas stamped into our passports. We may or may not combine this with a visit to the National Zoo to cehck out the new baby gorilla. We don't all have to go; one person could take up all four passports and the fee. I've argued, though, that just in case there's a signature missing or an "i" that needs dotting or a "t" that needs crossing, we should all go. Murphy's law, ya know!

Staying in Touch in a Small Way

This morning, I ordered three netbooks, one for myself and one for each son. The husband is going to order his own through the university. For those who don't follow the world of computing, a netbook is a very small laptop designed primarily for writing and web work while on the road. The sons want to continue with their writing on the trip, and I want to be able to maintain this blog in addition to do some writing. Also, since we're not taking a cell phone, e-mail will be our principal means of communicating with folks back here.

In the case of the netbooks I ordered, "very small" means that the screen is 8.9 inches measured diagonally, the whole unit measures 6.7 x 9.8 x 1.1 inches, and it weighs a mere 2.2 pounds (1 kilo). The cost is comparably small. The ones I ordered cost $379 each. I could have gotten them cheaper, but we decided to go for 160 gb hard drives for photo storage; some netbooks have solid state drives as small as 4 gb. There are actually more brands of netbook than one might imagine, and it took a while for us to decide which one(s) to get. Acer? ASUS? HP? Samsung? Another brand? In the end, we all went for the Acer Aspire One. Younger son chose a black model, while older son went for sapphire blue so as to be able to tell his netbook from his brother's. Keeping that thought in mind but not wanting a white model, I opted for the (drum roll) pink one shown here. Yeah, it's gonna add to the fun of this trip.

She's Got a Ticket to Ride ...

Well, to fly anyway! But first, Debi commented on the number of details, all those list items. Yeah, there are a lot, and there are even more now, which I will try to note below.

We have purchased tickets and have an itinerary! Interestingly enough, the air travel costs significantly less if purchased as two separate air tickets: here to Europe and back to here, and Europe to Vietnam and back to Europe. Don't ask me why. Even the travel agent couldn't say for sure. There are still plenty of details to be worked out on the ground parts of the trip, but the air parts are now set with non-refundable, non-changeable tickets. [THING TO DO: Book travel insurance.]

We will fly out of Washington-Dulles on Wednesday, March 4, at 6:50 p.m. on British Air. [THINGS TO DO: Fill out all the British Air info online, including making sure younger son can get vegetarian meals. Find a grad student who'd like to score some dough driving us to the airport.] This first plane lands at London-Heathrow on Thursday, March 5, at 6:45 a.m. local time. We then get to navigate through Heathrow for a 10:35 a.m. British Air flight to Frankfurt, Germany, where we land at 1:20 p.m. and reclaim our luggage so as to switch to our second ticket, on Qatar Air. [THING TO DO: Check with Blaine's friend Horst as to whether he and his wife Yoko can come see us at the airport since they won't be in town when we come back through in April.] We leave Frankfurt on Qatar Air at 10:20 p.m. local time, arriving at Qatar-Doha at 6:15 a.m. local time on Friday, March 6. An hour later, we jump on another Qatar Air flight to Ho Chi Minh City, arriving at 6:40 p.m. local time. In other words, we leave here on Wednesday night and arrive in Ho Chi Minh City Friday night, which given the 12-hour time difference corresponds to early Friday morning here. Jet lag? Yeah, maybe, but maybe not given how big a change it is. The one other time I traveled to Asia (to Hong Kong), I had much less of a problem with jet lag than on any trip to Europe.

[THINGS TO DO: Arrange travel from Ho Chi Minh City to Hue, and from Hue to Hanoi on the flip side. Get adult PADI cards for the sons so that we can go scuba diving during the Hue stay. Figure out April 8-13 activities possibly including a junk sail in Halong Bay and visit to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Get back to Ho Chi Minh City by morning of Tuesday, April 14.] On the return side, we leave Ho Chi Minh City at 8:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, April 14, arriving at Qatar-Doha at 11:59 p.m. local time. Another quick layover, since we'll be back in the air at 1:15 a.m., to arrive in Frankfurt at 6:50 a.m. It will now be Wednesday, April 15. [THING TO DO: Make sure the husband has done the taxes before we leave on this little adventure; otherwise, he'll be looking for a photocopy machine in Frankfurt and wanting to mail them from there after we land.]

MORE THINGS TO DO: Figure out the Europe stay. We'll be landing in Frankfurt, but want to go to the Netherlands first. The train ride along the Rhine is well worth it, so we should figure out if all the separate train trips can be covered under some form of Eurail pass. We'll likely want to rent a car in the Netherlands since Apenheul especially is much easier to reach with a car than by train and bus. When will we head to Norway? Nineteen years ago, we did a night train from Amsterdam to Copenhagen, spent a day there, then did another night train to Oslo. Do we want to take the train from Oslo to Trondheim (when we did this 19 years ago, the route we took had scenery to die for, though when we got to Trondheim the relatives said it was too bad we hadn't taken the later train that went by the more scenic route), or do we want to rent a car and drive? We will likely do the Oslo touring at the end of the trip, since that's where the husband and I will be flying home from on Monday, May 4. We'll need to have another or the same grad student pick us up at Washington-Dulles that evening. The sons will be flying home from Frankfurt three weeks later, on Monday, May 25, but we won't need to arrange their airport transportation since we'll just be meeting them ourselves.

MORE THINGS TO DO ON THE HOME FRONT: Figure out how to get the dog walked several times a week while we're gone. My mom will take care of him, but she isn't able to walk him, and we don't want him to go two months with no exercise. Younger son's girlfriend was going to walk him, but since he broke up with her, well, that might not work out so well. And asking his new girlfriend could also be touchy. We can look into the one local dog-walking service or start canvassing neighborhood kids, most of whom we never really see since our kids are older.

So, it's now very real, and will be even more real when the credit card bill arrives (we charged it on a card that gives us frequent flyer miles on another airline). And I really must start to look for luggage (I so do not want to use a wheeled bag because of the weight of the wheels) and a safety line for the lens cap on my new (to me; I got it off Craigslist) digital SLR; figure out what travel overrides I will need on various prescriptions; get backup glasses for three of us (my eye doc appointment is Monday, and older son's is the following Monday; the husband has just been reminded about making his own appointment); get the husband and sons to the dentist; notify all the credit card companies and the bank that we will be using our cards internationally; make sure that the sons' bank cards will work internationally. Finally, there's finding some time to head south to Florida to see my dad and stepmother before we leave. I know there's more, but all the above seem like quite enough for now.

Tickets to Fly and Visas, Too

This morning's e-mail included one forwarded by the dear husband relaying the approval number for our visas to Vietnam. He's checking whether this means we can now head up to Washington, DC, to the Vietnamese embassy, to get our passports stamped. The visas are supposed to be for multiple entries, to allow us to leave Vietnam for Cambodia, to visit Angkor Wat, and then re-enter Vietnam for our flight out. The dear husband was also going to try to make it to the travel agent today to get reservations in place for the going and coming. I've been tackling my own continuing list. I have one more account to set up with online payment and then I think we'll be good to go on paying utility bills from afar. The mortgage is already on a pay-ahead schedule that will mean we won't need to write checks for the two months we're away. The sons have their Eurail passes, though they still need hostel cards and international student ID cards. It's all becoming a bit more real each and every day.

It's Coming Together (i.e., Money Has Been Spent)

Thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday, I was able to convene all the men in one place at one time to discuss dates, those little somethings needed in order to make reservations. I didn't even need to offer food to lure men to the table. I merely noted that the special on Eurail passes was about to expire, so money could be saved by meeting then and there, which we did.

The husband will meet with our travel agent when she's back from her own two-week vacation in South Africa, but he has several dates to work from in the hopes that some flexibility might get us a lower fare. We're shooting to fly to Ho Chi Minh City on March 3, 4, or 5, through either Paris (on Air France) or Amsterdam (on KLM). Amsterdam would be preferable in terms of our European plans, but if the air fare through Paris is cheap enough to offset the passage we'd then need between Paris and Amsterdam on the return leg, we could certainly go the French route. We plan to overcome jet lag and see a bit of Ho Chi Minh City before going to Hue on March 7. The first day of teaching is March 9.

The last day of teaching is April 4, and the husband has been invited to give a talk in Hanoi on April 6, which just happens to be his 58th birthday. After that, we'd like to spend two days on a junk sailing through Halong Bay. If you've seen the Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies, you've seen some of Halong Bay. Then it will be back to Ho Chi Minh City and, from there, on to Siem Reap, Cambodia and Angkor Wat. We've been warned by a friend in the know to keep an eye on the State Department's travel advisory website in case the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute takes a turn for the worse. If it has, and there are advisories against travel to Angkor, we'll see more of Vietnam and then fly to Europe from Ho Chi Minh City on April 13 or 14.

Once we're in Europe, the plan is to get from either Paris or Amsterdam to Oslo to let the younger son binge on Nordic history and culture. We'll also head to Trondheim to visit third and fouth cousins, descendants of the one who stayed in Norway when all his siblings emigrated to Canada and the U.S. Younger son has also requested some hiking in the Norwegian mountains, which I too would love, so we will endeavor to arrange that as well. Once we've done and seen as much as time allows in Norway, we'll head back to the Netherlands to show younger son where we lived when he was born and let older son visit a couple of places he says he vaguely remembers from the year we lived there, when he was two. The two places, Madurodam and Apenheul, are quite distinctive, so I wouldn't discount his memories. Madurodam is a miniature Dutch city, and Apenheul is an open-air primate zoo.

The husband and I will fly back on May 4, 5, or 6, and the young men will follow three weeks later. The Eurail pass special got them month-long passes for the price of three-week passes, so the continent is open to them. Since their passes are good for a month, they can also take a dry run excursion or two on their own while we're still over there with them. I did Europe at the same age younger son will be (19), so they should be fine. Still, as a Mom one of the things I do best is worry.

Loving it when a plan starts to come together!

A Couple More Somethings To Think About

Someone I know who spent some time in Vietnam (and Hue) "during the conflict" has posed the question of whether the driver provided to us on weekends might really be a government minder taking note of where the Americans go and what they do during their free time. An interesting point to ponder ... and perhaps keep in mind if I decide to do National Novel Writing Month in 2009 and use the trip as a plot element.

Another thing to think about is how to take books, and possibly a lot of them, along with us. Kindles are pretty pricey, and we might need/want more than one. There is always Project Gutenberg since we'll have Internet access at the hotel, but that limits us to the classics or other works out of copyright. I need to investigate whether there's a way past the 4,000-odd character limit on text files put on an iPod. In other words, is there a way to use an iPod as an e-book reader and not just for audiobooks?