I'll Go Where You Want Me To Go, Dear Lord

It is 1:40 am Vietnam time (11 pm AZ time) on Thursday morning, September 13th.  I am quietly typing away on the bottom bunk in a dark hostel room whilst the rest of my family sleeps.  This is the first time they have all been asleep at 1:40 in the morning since Sunday!  After 30 hours of travel and two crazy jet lagged nights (Powderpuff Girls in Vietnamese at 2 am anyone?) I am praying that tonight they actually sleep through the night!  I probably will too, at some point. :)

Ok, I escaped to the roof terrace.  There’s a lovely drifty breeze and floaty clouds tinted pink by the city lights.  I feel peaceful and grateful for the first time in a few days.  

Late last Friday night I was attending to the last minute things I needed to do before we took our flight to Bali and the rest of our lives.  Whilst nursing baby Z earlier in the evening I had a figment of memory return to me that I hadn’t purchased a ticket for Zoya yet; the airline we were flying in required a call in to get an infant ticket.  So I got on my email to find the phone number when I saw something strange:

Flight Itinerary

Departure Hong KongBaliMon  10  Sep  2018

 Ummm….where was the information for the first leg of the flight? There. Was. None.  Yep.  2.5 days before our departure, and we don’t have tickets from LA.  What we do have is tickets from Hong Kong to Bali leaving on Monday at noon from LA.  So unless we figure out how to get from St. George (where we were) to LA to take a flight on Saturday (the next day), these flights were useless to us.  Holy Insanity!!!

I worked late into the night trying to figure out what had happened and what could be done.  Since I hadn’t noticed the mistake until now, I was told that the tickets couldn’t be refunded.  But changing them and getting a new one to Hong Kong last minute was not an affordable option.  (My ego would like you all to know that this particular airline has major issues when trying to book and when I booked the tickets originally I was kicked off multiple times AND my settings reset multiple times before my payment went through.  The mistake was definitely theirs.  That said, who books one way tickets for their entire family to a foreign country and doesn’t check to make sure that the booking is correct?  Anywho…)

We really needed to be flying out on Monday or maybe, if needs be, Tuesday, because my parents were taking us to LA at the beginning of their own road trip, and if we didn’t go then, we wouldn’t have a vehicle to get us there.  The same airline lured me with insanely cheap last minute tickets, only to kick me off time and time again and then raise the price by hundreds of dollars.  At this point when I was ready to give up for the night, my little guy woke up screaming with painful growing pains.  My husband, our dear friend we were staying with and I took care of him and got him back to bed.  And morning came two hours later with my early riser Z baby.

Night-of-practically-no-sleep-number-1 down on the books.

Saturday all of the sane parts of me (read: my husband) urged me to stay home while the family went out for a hike with our dear friends we were staying with.  I felt I needed nature as much as sleep though, so I joined the crew for a lovely walk in Kolob Canyon, Zion NP.  I think it helped clear my mind because I had the thought: perhaps we’re not meant to go to Bali on Monday!  Perhaps we are meant to go straight to where Riley’s internship will be!  We didn’t have one secured yet, but had been planning on Chiang May, Thailand.  However, we were both beginning to get warm fuzzies when we thought about Vietnam, and a couple of possible internship opportunities there.  

When we got home I found that tickets were super cheap—in fact the exact same price as the original Bali tickets I had tried to purchase two months ago.  And they left on the same originating flight from LAX at noon on Monday!  I tried to book them and…the system kicked me off.  Ok.  Pause.  I figured we had better check in with the Boss.  Riley and I stepped outside, did some talking, made a decision and said a prayer.  We received confirmation that this was the direction God wanted us to take.  So I went back inside, tried to book the ticket and this time everything went through easily and quickly.  

That night I cancelled our place in Bali and looked for a room for our layover in Hong Kong and our first few nights in Ho Chi Minh City.  Found a place in  HCMC but couldn’t find one in Hong Kong.  Thankfully I realized the next day that we weren’t overnighting in Hong Kong anymore.  One less thing to cancel!  

I thought we were ready to go, but I woke up to 6 am on Monday morning, 6 hours before our flight with the feeling that I should recheck visa requirements.  Sure enough, it is the only country in SE Asia that requires visas.  Again, thankfully, I discovered that you can order a visa and pick it up upon arrival.  If we paid for urgent processing it would be done in one business day.  Since we had an overnight flight and due to the 15 hour time difference, we could apply for a visa Monday morning and by Tuesday evening when we were to land in Hong Kong for a layover it would be ready.  So we flew to Hong Kong without visas and printed them out at the airport and then got some visa pictures in a photo booth while we were waiting for our flight to Ho Chi Minh City!

We arrived in Viet Nam at 345 am and headed over to the visa processing area.  There was a whole room full of people who had already dropped off their applications and were waiting to pay for their visas.  It took me about 20 minutes to fill out all of the paperwork whilst Riley watched the kids and Levi (my 3.5 year old) ran around yelling “My mom’s in prison!  We’re in prison!”  This whole time not one person in the room had left, no one’s paperwork was bing processed as far as we could tell.

I set an intention (with a tinge of guilt) that we be the first to get processed.  5 minutes later someone came to the counter, called our names and handed us our passports and visas.  I was grateful, although our fellow passengers were a little irked.

Next to the passport control line, which, when we tried to enter it we got waved through to the diplomat line and went straight through.  Mercy after mercy!  We made it!  Now all we had to do was get a taxi to the hotel.  So we went to the ATM to take out some cash, but…it wouldn’t give us any.  We tried another and…it wouldn’t give us any.  Since it was 4 in the morning, the money exchange office wasn’t open.  I was just on the edge of sanity, having been mostly awake for 32 hours or so with my tired, crazy family.  A gentleman walked past after having successfully pulled out some money from the ATM and “ATM to working for you?”  While I grouchily replied in the affirmative, Riley saw an opportunity and asked the gentleman if he would be willing to exchange some of the money he got with us for American bills.  He said no, pulled out his wallet and gave us 100$ worth of Vietnamese currency.   When Riley asked him how much he needed to give him, the fellow said “God Bless” and walked away.

The list of last minute miracles that happened in the course of a few days to get us here to Viet Nam is longer even that what I wrote above.  It is clear to us that this is where the Lord wants us, although we don’t yet know what that looks like.  We are “led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which [we] should do.  Nevertheless [we go] forth.”  (https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/4?lang=eng)

Now if we can only survive this jet lag!