Believe it or not, somehow we managed to do a few things right:
Tootsie happens to work at a hospital, and knows an infectious disease doctor. He took the time to give some advice to Tootsie and referred her to his website: www.travelhealthadvisor.com. From this website, the group got some great information about immunizations and other medications and diseases to be aware of while traveling the world.
Fry's Minute Clinic:
shots
prescription antibiotic for diarrhea
Malaria pills (make sure they are specific for your travel region)
TwoLively and MarcoPolo soaked their jeans in Permethrin, and were not bitten by mosquitos.
We were told to take crisp, clean, basically brand new $100 bills to pay for everything on the trip. ATM machines are few and very far between in Vietnam and we didn't want to incur any extra fees by using them. If you need a substantial amount of money in certain denominations, call your bank or credit union first. Most banks/credit unions can order new bills for you if you give them a few days notice. Even though we didn't do that, we were able to get what we needed. MarcoPolo had to go to a few branches of his credit union to get his bills.
Carrying around all that money can make you feel really nervous. Some of us used money belts or clips while others just kept their wallets basically at their fingertips at all times.
Set up blog account on Blogger.com
It's a pain-in-the-neck to add pictures to Blogger, so we downloaded PhotoScape (a free program for creating picture collages) We never saw any instructions--so good thing it's a fairly intuitive program. Open the program, click on the "Combine" tab, then start dropping pictures in! The settings we adjusted: select the "Checker" tab, outer margin: 25 (black edge around photos), intervals: 25 (black lines between photos), columns: 3 (to display 3 pictures across), slide preview zoom down to 10% (so you can see the photo montage) -- then Save. To quickly delete the pictures and start over, hi-lite all the pictures, then hit "delete." Voila!
SKYPE
Skype was a great way to keep in touch with the family members that didn't come with us on the trip. It was great to see familiar faces and show them "live" pictures of us and what we were doing. The Griffith patriarch and matriarch even learned how to Skype (and even though it was just a few days before we came home...they actually figured out the time difference and didn't call us at 3:00am, We were all impressed that they could answer/initiate video calls all by themselves!)
Big Kudos to the Travel Agent and her family for planning everything for us. We had enough time to do A LOT of things and no time to be bored. The hotels were central to the things we wanted to see and do and we got a great deal on pretty much everything. Having local contacts is a huge bonus. We managed okay the few days we were on our own, but being with our "local family" made things much more accessible and easy for us.
