An Bang Beach

I woke this morning at 4:30, make that 4:27, to the rooster alarm clock living next door. No big deal that is just what time I get anyway, even on vacation. The whole street started waking. The fishermen made their way to the beach in the fog to begin the days catch.

The kids are having a relaxing morning as they are both recovering from all the heat and action that we have had so far. They even had some TV time watching the international sensation that is 'Wipeout' followed by some English and foreign language cartoons.

We have been staying in hotels up until this point and have enjoyed the relative security that they offer. Being in a house now we are being careful to hide some of the things we leave behind in a more concealed way. Riley won the where do we hide it award for today. Who would guess anything was in the billows if the insect canopy.

Security is turning out not to be an issue. As far as we can tell, there is always activity in the house. There are two housekeepers, one who lives across the street and one who always seems to be in a nearby hammock. Whenever we leave they come in and do a few things here and there like dishes, tidying up, even folding our clothes. Here she is tending our clothes on the line across the street. We are going to leave them a nice tip. Can you see Patti's bloomers?

When we are living out of backpacks we seem to do less snacking as there is not much extra food hanging around. However, when we do, we seem to land on certain snacks as a function of availability and preference. In Europe it was chocolate, in China it was McDonalds ice cream, in Vietnam it is Pringles. We do need to taper the junk a little so we can eat through the 50 power bars that Patti packed. The girls cannot deal with the thought of seaweed in their Pringles, so they are mine all mine.

Leave it to Patti to interweave a little beach vacation into the trip. The next three days we spend on the shores of Nha Trang. The kids had a great time playing in the sand and surf today. Our budding civil engineers are digging a foundation for their castle of sand with some trash they found on the beach. In the background is a local fishing vessel in its mooring.

By the way, Riley was first at lunch today, finally. She was the lonely eater for once, but we helped her with those tasty fried spring rolls.

Last night a very old lady came to our table to sell us some peanuts and we said no thanks. In hindsight I wanted to buy her peanuts for far more than they were worth out of a sense of charity and gratefulness for all that God has given to me. I think this is a tough time of year as the restaurants are virtually dead and there are not too many peanut sales. She came to us almost immediately after we sat down for lunch today and I made it worth her time.

We took one last ride to dinner and returned in the dark. Here is a Tara night shot of Patti from the back of my bike.

At about 7:00pm one of our neighbors with a really loud PA system and a really bad voice started cranking out what we could only guess was some very bad Karaoke. Keep in mind this was lid enough for a city block to hear. We could be wrong about what that was but yikes that was some bad singing.

Just a few more pics in the Hoi An & An Bang album.

Tomorrow morning we board our second of three intra-Vietnam flights. We were not sure what to expect, but by all appearances the flights are virtually indistinguishable from a domestic U.S. fight. However, the pilot did hit the thrust reversers as hard as I had ever felt on the last landing. That was fun for the kids.