Lauren's back home from Toronto this week and we decided it would be a good time to get some trip planning done (since it's in less than 70 days now!!!).
First we went to MEC and I GOT MY BACKPACK!! *happy dance* I've posted a picture of it on my Instagram if anyone is interested in looking at it (http://instagram.com/p/poKHmYNNyS/). It's a MEC Aria 40L backpack in the Beet Red/Firecracker colours and I love it! I've had my eye on it for awhile and I've looked around at other places for other ones but I never found one that I liked as much and cost as little as this one. My Aunt gave me $100 to put towards my backpack as a birthday/graduation gift and the bag was $99 so it was perfect (thanks Auntie Rie!!)!
Lauren also got some stuff at MEC but I won't go into details about that because most of it was for Chris's birthday and if I'm being honest I have no idea who reads this and if he sees this before his birthday then I don't want to ruin any surprises hahah!
After we were finished at MEC we went to Starbucks to talk about some trip specifics. First, we looked into booking a hotel for our first night in Ho Chi Minh City. We fly into HCM at 12:45am local time so we wanted to make sure we got somewhere close to the airport that we can just get to quickly so we can just absolutely crash after spending 26 hours (36 with the time difference) in airplanes to get there!
We ended up going with the Family Inn Saigon Hotel. Our room is regularly $71 a night and we got it for $38 on Expedia! It looks absolutely gorgeous and it will (theoretically) be an amazing place to get our feet under us since it's only 8km from the airport but only a 15min taxi ride to the core of HCM! We ended up deciding to book 3 nights there so we'll stay until Saturday and then head on to Cambodia (if we love HCM we can spend more time there at the end of the trip since we're flying out of there to get back home as well)!
We then moved on to talking about travel insurance. It's so complicated!! The policies are all in "legalese" and they're all so similar but also so different! My Lonely Planet book recommended World Nomads Travel Insurance so we looked into that one first and it definitely looks like a good one (at $250ish for 2 months). Then I looked at the President's Choice Travel Insurance because I already bank with them and figured it would be easy to just go into my local bank and get it through them in person and have them explain it to me. Theirs is almost $100 cheaper and looks pretty similar to the World Nomads policy but I really need to look at them side by side and compare every point. I definitely don't want to get into a situation and then realize I should have gone with a different plan, especially on the other side of the globe!
If anyone has any recommendations on travel insurance or the best way to get from HCM to Phnom Penh I'm all ears! :)
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