Trip to the hospital

It's time to let you and the rest of the world know what's been going on in Vietnam during these past few weeks. I'll start off by describing the events that led to Rich's sweet new look.

We left you, the reader, in total suspense during a previous blog saying we were off to rent scooters to head to Da Lat for the weekend. We apologize for our tardiness. Anyways, this was 2 weekends ago, and long story short, we never made it to our final destination. We ended up leaving about 2 hours later than planned and ended up taking the wrong route, which left us with about 40 km more to travel than the regular route.

It is important to note that these roads were straight ridiculous with some of the craziest traffic and wreckless driving imaginable. Picture 18 wheelers and huge tour buses passing each other on dirt roads, while scooters are driving at you on the right driving against traffic. We equated it to playing a video game, but probably a little more fun. Needless to say, our first incident came when Dave got a flat tire in the middle of nowhere as the sun was going down. Luckily we pulled over and happened to stop right next to a mechanic shop/restaurant that was able to fix us up within 45 minutes. This is where Rich started to weird out the little kids that were so enthralled at the site of 5 decently big white guys in the middle of their desolate, poor village in Vietnam. Insert pic of live pigs and calf's strapped to the back of scooters (no joke).

At this point, it was getting dark and we still hadn't reached the half way point of our alleged four hour journey. We knew from this point that we still had a pretty treacherous mountain climb ahead of us, and all we could see in the mountains was lightning and massive black clouds rolling in. What would normally signal to the average human being as a a reason to either turn around or stop for some reason didn't register. We did not even think about stopping. In fact, we were laughing at how awesome our situation was and how incredible the experience had already been up until that point.

30 minutes later, our trip was stopped prematurely and involuntarily when our friend Ryan skidded out on a patch of sand, causing both he and Rich to hit the deck. Miraculousyly, both were had relatively minor injuries considering the circumstances. Well, I guess if you call a stage 3 shoulder separation and a severely road rashed leg and foot, then we're good. Long story short, we spent most the night in an extremely depressing hospital waiting for the "doctor" to patch our two friends up. We never reached our final destination, but at least we have a damn good story that came out of it.