So we leave tomorrow from our home at 8 AM…

Now it is just about time to go to bed after a busy day. We’ve really had the travel stuff under control for days. We were basically packed two days ago, with finishing touches yesterday.

A small crisis came last night. We confirmed with our travel coordinator from World Child that we were supposed to get new letters of employment, updating those in our dossier, for the U.S. embassy. That one slipped by us. But we sent the emails out to our employers. Peggy got hers first thing in the morning. I didn’t get mine until late in the afternoon, which made me a little bit nervous. But in the end it was pretty simple and painless to take care of it. We’re glad that was the only crisis—except for the five minutes or so when I forgot my passport was in the travel backpack and couldn’t find it.

Among my jobs today was installing the two baby car seats in Peggy’s car, which will pick us up at the airport in three weeks or so. Yes, I left it until 10:30 PM the night before we traveled. Peggy was pretty good about that one, although I could tell she was a little bit anxious.

Tonight I also had to make a final decision about books to bring for the long trip. Peggy has a bunch of books to read for her University of Chicago classes when she returns, so she is choosing from among those. Right now it is Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie for her Chicago literature class, and she’s taking at least one more of her class books. What I need is one of those books one can’t put down. The most recent one I’ve had like that was Kenny Moore’s biography of Bill Bowerman, the legendary Oregon track coach, which my cross country boys gave me last fall and which I read in a few days. But I don’t have that kind of book handy, I don’t think. I heard the Chinese writer Anchee Min on NPR this week while she was visiting Chicago, and I liked her Wild Ginger. So I will probably take her Becoming Madame Mao. Then Peggy pulled out a book of short stories by Adam Haslett, You are not a stranger here. I also have a big collection of Andre Dubus stories handy. Finally, we bought a few books by Vietnamese writers or about travelers to Vietnam. I read Dana Sachs’s The House on Dream Street back in January. But we have a few more we bought at the same time. I’ll let you know later my final choices.

Otherwise today was my last track practice. I sent the boys off to the Chicago Catholic League indoor championship meet on Sunday with a video update for the season. Then as they filed out of the room each of the 50 boys gave me hug. As someone I told said, “That’s kind of a big deal for teenage boys, isn’t it?” It was parent teacher conferences today, and when I bumped into one parent and told her, she said, “My son did that? He doesn’t even hug us.”

The last bit of news isn’t the best, but we will make the best of it. We heard yesterday that our G&R date had been moved from Monday to Wednesday. Today we were told it has been moved to Thursday. It means more waiting, of course. Our travel agent, Todd Gallinek, who had heard the news from our fellow World Child traveling families, called to say we had a small window tonight to postpone our flight to next week. We decided just to fly. Later tonight we heard from Jenny at World Child. Our Vietnam guide Martin is trying to arrange a short two-night trip to Sappa, in the northern mountains. It will be relatively inexpensive, and it includes a train ride and a visit to what I suppose is a Shangri La-type ethnic village—not a trip we could take with the babies. So we told Jenny we are flying and we are in on the Sappa trip. We will classify this as making lemonade.

Among other things, as we considered whether to postpone our travel, it did strike me that it wouldn’t have been quite right to show up at practice tomorrow after all those man-hugs.

I suspect you won’t hear from us again until we are using the internet in our Hanoi hotel room.