We were at the pool at 8am! Our last day and we wanted to make the most of it...

12.30 Time to dry off :-( and start packing...a lovely chilled last session by the pool.

2pm Lunch at the Hotel

3pm Leave for The airport...

7.30pm: Now currently in Lucky cafe 2 restaurant in Hanoi airport. The flight from Da Nang was an hour and we now have a 6 hour transit wait till our flight to LGW!
Kids were very keen to go back into Hanoi city and have dinner at New Day, but too much pfaff. We cannot check in our luggage until 9pm and the journey takes 45 minutes one way.
Lucky 2's food is not up to Bamber expectations! Service, like the food is non descript, but then they have little competition.
It is the only decent restaurant serving food. We will be tucking into those ritz and oreo biscuits we bought earlier...

We still cannot believe we have come to the end of our trip. We have all had an amazing time and it has been a wonderful experience! We are very lucky to have had the time to have been able to do this. I should change jobs more often.

OH MY GOODNESS!!! As I was typing above paragraph, saw a large black mouse run under our table!!!! I scream VERY LOUDLY and jump up only my seat!!! Damian startles, kids ask if I'm ok, everyone in the restaurant stares! I shout there's a mouse . I'm ignored! We ask for the bill and leave!!!! That restaurant is definitely not lucky...I WILL be posting a trip advisor comment.

Back to our trip...
Apart from the "meal" we have just had, the food in both Cambodia and Vietnam has been just delicious. We have tried lots of new dishes (some of the ingredients we will definitely be using when we next cook) The duck with banana leaf salad at Morning Glory is one of my favourites, for Emma and Damian it will be the salt and peppered spare ribs in New May and for Jake the chicken curry at Streets. Bar Lucky 2, all the restaurant staff have always been very welcoming and the service very friendly be it a high end hotel or a street hawker place where we had breakfast on our morning tour with Anh in Hanoi.

Hotel staff, guest houses and homestays too have been very friendly. They want to see tourists and for us to return...

Along our travels we have met some real entrepreneurs wanting to make a real difference for themselves and their families. Anh, Lang and Van. Good luck to all of them.
We have found out just how important trip advisor and the Lonely planet are. Everyone who is travelling has a lonely planet in their hand and as you know we refer to this "bible" and tripadvisor for lunch and dinner recommendations!
Everyone we have found out is doing the same. The excellent comments questionnaire we filled out for The Essence hotel (where the staff member motorbiked Damian to find his mobile!) emailed us to thank us and asked if we would be so kind to post a review on tripadvisor! Others have done the same.
Those that have stood out as being very good or very bad, we have posted comments :-)

I am very grateful to my travel sickness tablets, Sturgeon and very proud of the kids. We have done one too many overnight train journeys,a few very long coach journeys and a 6 hour boat trip along the Mekong from Phnom to Chau Doc and not forgetting the long flight here! They have loved every minute of it and never complained once. For them, they will be grateful for the iPad!

Pediures, manicures, foot massages, The hotel toilet seat to the not so pleasant showers at the guest house, the silk worms that we dared not try, the mangos, rambutans and longans that we ate far too many of, we have loved it all.

We will all return a little wiser having visited museums to learn about the past atrocities both countries have experienced. The kids know and understand just how lucky we are.
They have seen how some kids have very little and in some cases no opportunity of an education either.

We have done a trip we will all look back on with very fond memories.

Our flight doesn't leave till 1am.
We have another few hours to go yet.
It's going to be a very long night.
No iPads or books on this flight home...we will all close our eyes and try and get some sleep.

For those who have been following our blog, I hope you have enjoyed reading our "diary"
We have had fun writing it.

I'm excited at getting it all printed up so we can refer to all the entries, photos and messages you have posted in book form in years to come!

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