Pacific Specifics

This is it. The last blog for traveling. This is the re-entry blog. We spent the weekend in California with family, and the week with family in Utah. Trying to settle down was a suspenseful feat. I thought about writing a whole blog about the insanity of trying to find a place to live in a city that has a housing shortage. At least 2 of the property management places we went to said they had nothing available. In a town of 31,000 people. I visited all of my friends, and we spent $25 a day driving around looking. We followed every lead from our good friends. Nothing. I was starting to sweat in my sleep, wondering how we were going to figure this out. I arrived on Monday. The next Monday I was going to start work. We ended up going to a place that said they would show us some places, but for immediate move in, forget about it. The very first place we saw we applied for. They said they would have answers maybe the next day. Phooey for getting my hopes up. $70 in application fees, and ...

Not all travel is awesome in a good way. It's just full of awe, and you have to decide which adjective to use with it. My travel? Well it went like this. Get 4-5 hours of sleep on Wednesday night in Vietnam. Get up at 3:30am to catch the first short flight. Then wait around an airport in Ho Chin Minh (Saigon) for a few hours. Catch another short flight (under 2 hours) and wait around the Singapore airport for half the day. Catch another flight at 1:50am that is 7 hours long. Arrive in Tokyo at 10:30am on Friday 20th. Wait around the Tokyo airport and catch a 10 hour flight and arrive in Los Angeles at 10:30am on Friday the 20th. Life can seem so strange sometimes. On the last plane I was half asleep and half awake, and I was pretty much chanting: Last flight. Over and over again. I was going to try and do something constructive on these flights, but I was so tired. Too tired to read or even watch a movie. So I decided to call it meditation, and I tried to just go with the flow. ...

The United States of America. Home. What does that mean to you when you say it? "Going home". We have been gone for 2 years now. We gave everything away and have only a storage unit with some pictures and maybe some clothes (if they even still fit). I have spent the last 2 years thinking about The Next Great Adventure. Now going back to the US is a great adventure. Where is home?? I grew up on the west coast of Canada. I spent most of the next 20 years in Las Vegas. Then a year in Southern California and 3 years in Southern Utah. I'm not going home, I guess. I don't have a home. I have a job waiting for me! But I'm still working on getting an apartment/home for rent. That's it, I'm going back to Cedar City. And when I get there I will find a place. That's more accurate. I think 3 years is the longest I've rented in one house since 2002. I'm ready to settle down. I found a house for rent for $650 a month in our old neighborhood, and mayb...

I love to eat the lotus flower fruit. It seems more like a nut to me, but I looked it up and it's a fruit. What a treasure. First you get a beautiful flower, then it morphs into an odd shaped fruit, and you have to dig out the seeds and take off the shell of that. It's supposed to be a kind of superfruit. Different websites claim it can help with everything from acne to fighting fungal infections. They use it for bleeding disorders and it's all kinds of great for skincare. The guy on our tour said it's great for upset stomach and also cures constipation. I found a website about 23 amazing benefits of the lotus flower fruit and it said:  Nelumbo nucifera’s stem has been used to treat skin diseases like fungal infection and ringworm, smallpox, leprosy, vomiting, diarrhea, cough, dysentery, etc. This is a shot from Vinpearl island looking back at Nha Trang with this boat making a great focal point. This is view when you walk 5 minutes from our...

I finally felt functional so we went on the long anticipated cable car ride from Nha Trang to Vinpearl island. It's like a Disneyland. Or so I'm told, I've never been there. This was one cool island. Their water park looked pretty extensive in an impressive kind of way. It's so horribly hot during the day, we avoided most of it by heading over around 4pm. The cable car ride was pretty amazing. The water was such a pretty color. A tall ride over the South China Sea on a fun adventure. The ride was 12 minutes long. That's about quadruple the time it took us to stand in line in the evening just to get into one. There were no lines on the way there, and we had a romantic ride by ourselves. On the way back there were 8 of us hovering over the dark water on our way back. We did one ride that went all over the property in a kind of bumper car on a track. The first half of the ride was about going up and around and it was all automated. It went from where the cable cars l...

Hello July 14th. I haven't seen you in an entire year. I've only seen 46 of you until today. I think that makes you pretty rare and a special find. I have not written since we arrived in Nha Trang?! I think I know why. Because I arrived and had one good day, then I was sick as a dog for 6 days. I left the room maybe twice. Some kind of stomach bug. It was nasty, and I will spare you my descriptive writing about it. I will just say that dehydration was a serious concern, and I was very happy I wasn't throwing up too. It was the worst. Yesterday was my first day out and I felt so alive! So free! It was like I woke up from a deep sleep. I had to look up what day of the month it was. What day of the week it was. But I tell you what, those days of sickness were full of inspiration. It was the animated influence of a sick woman. During that time I figured a lot of things out, though, seriously. We flew in and the sun set as we drove to the Airbnb room, it was about an hour....

Hanoi is a trip. It's a whole different world. Few traffic lights, and people park their mopeds on the sidewalks. Unless there are bigger sidewalks with a little room, then they make it an extra lane during rush hour. Half the people have helmets. Seat belts aren't worn by the majority of our cab drivers. People don't use car seats for their kids. People ride with their babies and toddlers on mopeds. I just watch and watch, trying to figure it out what I'm looking at. I play this game I call "What is wrong with this picture?" Like oh, there are 5 people on that moped. Tonight we decided to check out a Vietnamese fast food joint called Lotteria. There are only a handful of fast food joints within walking distance. It's mostly where people have tiny closets open to the sidewalk to cook and itty bitty table and chairs on the sidewalks. I think crime is low here, I'm just guessing. Because on many streets here you can find people chopping up vegetable...