Roaming With the Jones

In Part II of our “Hanging with the Jones’” series, we give you the original Roaming Jones Family. While all the Jones tribe members we know in our lives share a sense of fun, adventure and a healthy dose of crazy, this family is the only one we know insane enough to leave home for a year and take a gaggle of kids around the world (See their excellent blog: The Roaming Jones). While the families had previously met for dinner once before our respective departures, our itinerary-stars aligned in Vietnam, where we took North, Central and Southern destinations by storm.

For those of you who have hung out with us, you know we leave a wide wake wherever we go… so you can imagine the tsunami of activity that 4 adults and 9 children left! Whether it was adventuring on a boat in Ha Long Bay, navigating street food vendors in Hanoi, riding mopeds in Mui Ne or playing many, many games of RummiKub across the country, our two families meshed shockingly well. Connecting with fellow travelers around the world is a big part of the overall experience; to connect with such an amazing family that will land back in the same hometown is ever so much more special.

Gretchen and Jon have a theory that they like to call “Subtraction by Addition.” Basically, the more people you add to an already large family, the easier it is to manage the whole troop. After months of international travel, this theory certainly worked its magic, giving all of us a chance to remix in new combinations of relationships for a little while. David splits the difference between Otto and Wescott’s ages, so the three boys spent lots of time hanging out, playing pool and riding mopeds. Molly and Yve are exactly the same age. With so much in common, the two quickly disappeared and hung out for most of the time we were all together. Maggie at 8, with the sweetest personality of anyone you’d want to meet, easily bounced between the older girls and the younger kids. Vivian, Tuck and Jones are all the same age, and the three had a blast doing crafts, setting up a tattoo parlors and making up all kinds of games.  As for the four of us adults, we had lots of opportunities to be, well, adults!

We started our Vietnam homecoming in the North, where everyone’s favorite honeymooning couple, Mouni and Kim, met both families. Barbequed street food and getting busted up by the police on Beer Street in a semi-legal homebrew establishment were among the highlights. But to really get to know each other, we decided to go on a 3-day, 2-night boat cruise together in Ha Long Bay. Check out Tuck’s excellent blog post to read more.

After our cruise, we schemed to meet back up in No Chi Minh City, where we would head to the Vietnam Coast for a week at the beach. Our plan to remain in Hanoi for another 10 days got cut a bit short after receiving glowing Instagram feeds from both the Jones Family as well as Mouni and Kim.  Adding Hoi An to our itinerary, we headed to the middle of the country assuming our friends had left for Ho Chi Minh before we would arrive. Completely by surprise, we spotted David’s smiling and somewhat bewildered face as we entered the courtyard of our awesome hotel. As if we hadn’t seen each other in years, the party began immediately. Mouni and Kim were also still in Hoi An so they luckily got more unplanned, quality time with the 9 kids J A perfect night ensued, filled with glowing lanterns, enchanting streets, an amazing street food dinner and of course, fantastic company. Call it a “flow” moment, or just being perfectly happy living inside the moment of now; we all had a standout evening. Far better than I can explain, Gretchen Jones wrote a great blog post about it on their family blog, which you can read here!

In Southern Vietnam, we met back up again in Ho Chi Minh City, where we kicked off our re-re-reunion at Ichiban, a disco-eclectic sushi bar and restaurant run by Vietnamese brothers who spent a lot of time in Southern California! A private room, an endless supply of sushi and many drinks made for the opposite of an intimate dining experience, as the 15 of us celebrated the last night of Mouni and Kim’s 3-week Vietnamese adventure. The evening ended in the bar with a dance party, sake bombs and a raid on an unsuspecting Baskin Robins who had already closed for the night but changed their minds after much coaxing…

Since we were becoming such fast friends, we decided to skip the dating courtship and just move in together. We headed to Mui Ne, with visions of kite boarding in our heads. After some shuffling of houses, we settled into 2 villas on a communist interpretation of the Truman Show’s set. Villa S79 housed the parents and the younger kids. Villa S8 was like a retro-MTV Real World episode, housing all the teens. With a couple of motorbikes to go back and forth, we reveled in the guilty pleasures of an all-inclusive, completely generic, you-could-be-anywhere, resort by the sea. The pool complex was staggering, and at pretty much any time of day, we could find all 9 children sliding on a tiled slide between two of the pools, playing king of the hill around lots of sharp tile edges… clearly lawyers have not taken hold of this country just yet!

I think all of us were a little hotel-weary, so we cooked most of our meals, including an outstanding fried rice dinner. In fact, I think all of us might have been slightly global-travel weary, and the time we spent in Mui Ne was almost like a vacation from our respective trips. While we did not end up kiting, we did manage to see the town, go on a surreal hike through a shallow, red-clay canyon and throw ourselves off of red sand dunes at sunset with and without plastic sleds. We parted company at the airport, the Roaming Jones off to Singapore, and we off to Thailand after a few more days of fun in Ho Chi Minh City.

We’re all on our own again, exploring new destinations and connecting with new people. But like brothers in arms, its comforting to know the Roaming Jones are out there somewhere to our south, right now sailing from Bali to Komodo Island in search of dragons. We look forward to each new Instagram and post from them. We’ve already planned our reunion in Seattle, wearing all of our shoes and clothes we each had made in Hoi An, and inevitably commiserating on the woes of leaving the open, global road and returning home.