Unfortunately these posts are going to be Shepler family health reports until we are all feeling better. My fever broke but I was up from 2AM onwards having coughing attacks. Nick generously took Millie out to breakfast at 7AM so that I could sleep in. He has done a lot of heavy lifting in the last few days.

When they got back we packed up our little hotel room and took a taxi to the Airport. This 45 minute ride was the extent of my Hiroshima sightseeing.

At the airport we had an annoying series of events that are almost too boring to recount. But that won’t stop me from trying for the sake of posterity. First we confused the heck out of the gate agent because Millie and I needed to travel out of Japan on US passports and into Vietnam on UK passports so we could save $200 on visa fees. Once we finally got that sorted, she wouldn’t return the passports to us unless we checked two of our bags. We agreed to do this (first time checking a bag all trip!) but it cost extra. The airline would only accept cash so Nick had to go to the ATM. The ATM wouldn’t accept foreign cards so he had to go to the currency exchange. She gave us the wrong number so we exchanged too much cash. And so on…

I took this photo to capture the mood. Considering how long it all took, Millie did great. I don’t want to jinx it but she has been so great at airports compared to the early days.

Eventually we got on the plane. This was a longer-haul flight than we are used to, 5.5 hours. We were in the back of the plane which was apparently the baby section, there were babies surrounding us on every side. Millie was in heaven. She even held hands with this one in front of us for a while.

I dosed myself with cough drops to fend off cough attacks, with mixed success. I wore my N95 mask the whole time and realized that the last time I wore a mask for this long was probably when I gave birth to Millie, almost exactly 5 years ago. Here I am looking potentially worse than after pushing a baby out.

We landed in Hanoi and survived the very long and chaotic passport control line. People kept cutting which felt very “we are not in Japan anymore”. We picked up our unwillingly checked bags and took a Grab to our Airbnb. I am fascinated by the way different regions have clear winners for ride share services.

By this point I had almost completely lost my voice, which was a treat for me because I was off the hook for Millie’s taxi game of “tell me a story”. We arrived, dropped our bags, and immediately went out in search of food. Instead of falling into the trap of being too hangry to choose a place, we went to the fancy Thai restaurant directly downstairs. Other than a brief moment when Millie choked on some chicken and then gagged it up, it was a great meal.

One funny thing is that they gave us silverware instead of chopsticks. We realized that after over two months of eating exclusively with chopsticks, forks felt weird.

We are two hours behind Japan, so by the end of the meal, Millie was fading. We came back and put her right to bed.