I planned our January R&R from my hospital bed in Bangkok last December. My intention was to pack the beginning of the trip with sightseeing and activities, then gradually slow the pace into a more leisurely vacation as the days went on. After our busy four-day visit to Hanoi, we headed to our second destination in Vietnam—the coastal city of Da Nang—where a private pool villa awaited us.
The domestic flight from Hanoi to Da Nang was easy and pleasant. A hotel driver delivered us to the airport, where we waited in the business class lounge until boarding. As a wheelchair passenger, I boarded the plane first. We ended up being the only passengers in the business class cabin.
V with his nón lá (Vietnam’s traditional conical hat, handcrafted from palm leaves over a bamboo frame) about to board our flight from Hanoi to Da Nang. Worn for centuries, the nón lá protects against sun and rain and remains a graceful symbol of Vietnamese culture and daily life. V picked it up with some bargaining on Hanoi’s busy streets.
We’d planned our stay at Furama Resort and Villas Da Nang. When we flew into Da Nang, a shuttle from Furama collected us from the airport. We tried to expedite the check-in process because it was lunchtime and we were hungry, while the reception staff seemed more intent on sharing lengthy details about the resort and its amenities. Fortunately, we had booked an all-inclusive stay with a pool villa, and some indulgent relaxation lay straight ahead!
During the three days we were at the resort, we never left the grounds. Our days settled into an easy, satisfying rhythm: wake up, have breakfast, work out (gently), swim, wander through the complex to one of the restaurants for a beautiful lunch, then swim again before showering and heading to dinner in the evening.
On a more celebratory note regarding our time in Da Nang, on the second evening I received the handshake email confirming my next assignment: consular chief in Sarajevo! I’d received the Bureau Leading Candidate (BLC) email three days earlier while we were in Hanoi. However, until I received the handshake, the good news previewed by the BLC had felt too good to be true (and too tentative to share). Once I got the handshake, though, right in the middle of dinner, I sent the news out far and wide as we celebrated all the good things that have already been happening in 2026.
It was the first truly intentional, unhurried time V and I had spent together since I was released from the hospital in December. We still had a great deal to process about my accident and the circumstances surrounding it.
My regret about Da Nang is that we didn’t stay longer and have a chance to experience the city. Three nights was not long enough to fully relax and settle into the beautiful pool villa, or plan side trips to nearby destinations like Hoi An which would have been worth seeing. (We hadn’t done the side trip to Ha Long Bay from Hanoi, either, in order not to exhaust ourselves.)
I also missed the chance to meet up with my friend and former colleague from my Peace Corps HQ days, A, who has been living in Da Nang for the past few years. It was partly A’s well-timed suggestion that Da Nang might be more my speed at the moment than Ho Chi Minh City that prompted me to look into visiting in the first place.
But at the end of the day, our brief time in Da Nang was not meant to be as busy as our time in Hanoi. Even if I’d wanted to try and pack five days of activities into three days, I wasn’t physically capable of it. It took me a good 20 minutes to walk the seven minutes to dinner, for example.
The prior couple of months had really taken a toll on us. Since November, V had been medically evacuated to Bangkok for emergency gallbladder surgery during the longest U.S. government shutdown in history, followed by a trip to Europe to help his ill mother—at the same time I was spending a month recovering in another Bangkok hospital after unexpectedly being hit by a truck.
I also wanted to make the most of what, in retrospect, was a rather expensive all-you-can-eat-and-drink package by not going into town and paying for additional meals. In light of all that, along with my limited mobility and depleted physical and emotional energy, I think we both simply needed to rest and use the R&R as a reset. And that was OK.
Fortunately, the third and last segment of our R&R still awaited in Bali, Indonesia—where we’d have a full eight days to relax in one place.
Collecting Postcards 