Tuesday

Sometime during her workday Friday, Sunshine found the time and fortitude to roll up her sleeves and wade into the chaos at the travel offices to duly dot the T's on the red tape between us and our tickets to Vietnam. At another point over the weekend, our itinerary arrived in the email making this journey, so far banked upon through blind faith alone, into a stone reality. Blind faith swings to the skeptical as I write this: she did paperwork stuff in a government office that paid off the next day? Pinch me. To keep from fainting, I will relate our new itinerary here. Early on the morning of October seventeenth, after staying up all night, we will board our first flight: from DC to San Francisco. We will be in the air for over five-and-a-half hours, but we will land less than three hours after taking off. Three-plus hours later we take to the skies again, this time flying to Hong Kong via the arctic circle great arc. This leg lasts almost fourteen hours, and we arrive five hours later than we took off; but since we also cross the International Date Line, we arrive five hours later on the following day. Notice that at two-point-five to one, flight hours versus longitude, we stay in the sunlight the whole trip. In Hong Kong we are only getting gas, so we will only be able to look at the city sunset through the airport windows during our two-hour layover. The flight on to Ho Chi Minh City is the shortest leg: only two-and-a-half hours, and we only go back in time-zones once. We arrive in Vietnam shortly before ten pm on Thursday, October eighteenth, thirty-nine hours forward on the clock, and twenty-eight hours after we initially boarded. [Cavin]