Mui Ne Day 1

Well, rest easy dear folks in the US - we are 13 hours ahead of you and our world has not ended yet, so I presume that you are all safe!  =)  But on a more ironic note, on this winter solstice day, 3 members of the Atkins family did get some significant sunburn. We are taking a few very leisurely days in a town called Mui Ne at a resort on the ocean.  The day was spent swimming in the pool and playing in the ocean.  In between there was a lot of shell collecting.  They have some amazingly beautiful shells here!

Today was our first full day in Vietnam where we did not have some illness.  On Wednesday night, I fell ill with the stomach flu and felt pretty miserable.  This was a little disconcerting because we were headed on a long bus ride on Thursday and I wasn't sure how I was going to handle that.  Thankfully, it went OK for the most part and I feel great today. 

The bus ride took us from Ho Chi Minh City to Mui Ne.  If you look at a map, they are only about 130 miles apart.  The bus ride took 6 hours to cover that distance.  This is fairly par for the course - it is hard to get anywhere very fast here.  How there traffic flows without any accidents amazes me.  I was in the front seat, and countless times we would be going to pass a truck in front of us, just to realize that there was a truck coming towards us in their lane.  In the US, if we passed a car and the oncoming car was as close as they are here, we would be panicking.   After the first or second time, I didn't even bat an eyelash at that scene anymore.

Julia is attracting a lot of attention here.  They keep coming up to us and saying "Vietnam baby?"  Or they do a double take if she is holding Doug's hand as they walk down the street.  At the last hotel that we stayed at they had wood floors in the rooms (most places here either have wood or tile floors, there is very little carpet).  A women from housekeeping came in to clean our room.  She looked at Julia's stockinged feet, said something to Doug's mom, then she picked up Julia, sat her down on her bottom and took off her socks.  She pointed to Julia's feet and then the wood floor and gestured to us that it was not safe for Julia to wear her socks on the slippery wood floor.  That kind of thing cracks me up!  

We have one more day here at the beach, and then we head to the town where Julia was born. 

Thanks for checking in,

Barbie for the gang