I left San Francisco at Noon Dec 31st, crossed the international dateline and arrived after a 14 hour flight in Hong Kong. The last time I was in Hong Kong was in January 1962, when Joan flew in to spend a year in Vietnam. I have a two hour layover before the flight continues to Saigon. The flight was full and I ended up in economy. It does not look much better for the next leg. The face lifts have healed well and the biopsies were negative for any malignancies. But my foot is still not quite healed and I am going to have to be careful for a while. I have been spoiled by many while on the Westcoast and celebrating the holidays. Wednesday night I stayed with my friends Bill and Laurel Wood in Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco. We had a very enjoyable visit and I met several of their friends. We became friends when Bll and Laurel lived in Gig Harbor.
I worked up two short slide shows of the visit, one with mostly photos of Mount Rainier and the train trip to Oregon at : https://cometosea.us/albums/albums/ScenicPacificNorthWest2009.pdf and another one with family photos of the holidays at :https://cometosea.us/albums/albums/Family%20N_W_2009.pdf
John, my oldest son, and his girlfriend Jessica came up from Portland for dinner with his two sisters and families the Saturday after Christmas.
I plan to travel from Saigon to Pnom Penh this coming week. The priest of my Gig Harbor parish, father Hung, will be there with a small group of the St.Nicholas church to visit the ethnic Vietnamese familes in Cambodia where father Hung used to serve before coming to the United States. He maintains a support organization to assist these mostly very poor villagers.