I can’t believe the day has finally come.  After months of planning, decision making and anticipation, I have finally gotten on a train, plane and an automobile and made my way to South East Asia for the start of an epic adventure.  Now that the day is finally here and I have actually arrived in Vietnam, things have finally started to sink in.  I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t a little bit scared at the uncertainty that the future holds, but I think the excitement and anticipation for the upcoming adventure has done a great job in suppressing the fear.  I also know that after a few weeks on the road, I will get settled into this lifestyle and it will become the norm.

The few days leading up to leaving provided the perfect send off as I will not see many of my friends I am used to seeing every week for an unknown ammount of time.  I am very humbled to have had over 60 people show up to an epic send off slash birthday party on Friday night.  It was a crazy mix of different friend groups from various walks of my life.  Everyone seemed to mingle pretty well and I had a fantastic time.I then had the distinct pleasure of being part of the wedding of Angelique and Chris the next day.  I have made so many very close and meaningful friendships with the members of the East Bay Beer Runners family and am so happy to have been included in their special day.  I feel like I have known the group for years and yet have only known many of them for just over a year.  This final weekend was a world wind of activity and I barely had time to think about my upcoming trip.  Sunday morning I hopped on the BART and headed to the airport.

The flight to Shanghai was uneventful but once I landed, I had my hopefully first of many new friend travel experiences.  I was at the information board looking for my flight information and there was a fellow traveling standing next to me trying to find his flight information.  Turns out he had been on the same flight from San Francisco and was going to meet a girl in Caines Australia for the next 3 months or so.  We got to talking and I invited him to join me in the airport lounge as I can bring up to two guests with me as part of the priority pass program.  He had never been in an airport lounge before so he appreciated the gesture.  We hung out in the lounge for 2 hours, chatting and sharing travel experiences, before it was time to head to our respective gates.  Chatting with a fellow traveler made the almost 4 hour layover go by much quicker and our two flights gates were side by side.  We hung out for a bit longer, shared a song of Santeria by Sublime on his ukulele and then parted ways.  I need to get better at documenting some of these travel experiences and am a little bummed, I didn’t ask him to take his portrait.  But I am sure I will get better as time goes on and develop more of a knack for this documentation thing.  I think it would be really cool to take a portrait and write a small blurb about who the person is and what we talked about.  I did manage to get some video footage of him playing the uk, so at least I have something.

I hope to make these posts slightly more picture filled in the future, but wanted to write a brief introductory post detailing some of my post trip feelings.  Once I write the next post, I will have spent some time in Ho Chi Min and will have some more exciting things to report.  I also need to work a bit on the look and feel of this site as it is a little bit basic at the moment.  As I get some time and some internet access I will work to improve the look and feel.

I am still working on my photo workflow and working out some kinks, so bare with me on the quality of the images right now.

I am probably leaving Saigon tomorrow so will try and write up an update when I get a chance.  It’s day 3 and so many amazing memories have already been created.