I was late in meeting up with the group Friday after work at Cynthia's work place to carpool to the airport on Friday because I had a hard time getting there from Kenny's district office in Irving due to difficulty in finding one of the roads. Our flight ran into a little turbulence as we descended into the DC area for landing at Dulles International Airport. We got free upgrade to two minivans because they didn't have any fullsize available. We met up with Hoang and Kaitlin, a friend of Cynthia from Biloxi at the hotel and then drove up to Rockville for dinner at Chau's place. Chau had really good crabs but nothing else other than that.

Saturday, we met up at Dung's sister's place and Hoang brief the whole team regarding what our functions were and what we needed to do as volunteers for the Vietnam Freedom March event later in the day before heading out for Dim Sum at a restaurant called New Fortune near the Eden mall. We had to go and buy ponchos before heading back to downtown DC for the march. The march went great, though it started to rain cats and dogs at about 20:30, thirty minutes before the scheduled event closing. Duy and the organizing committee had to jump through a lot of hoops to get permits for the march from three different government agencies: the National Park Service Police who had jurisdiction over the John Marshall park, where we gathered to begin the march, the Metropolitan Police who had jurisdiction over and authority to cordon off traffic on the sections of streets between John Marshall park and the Capitol lawn, basically Pennsylvania between 4th and 1st street, NW, and the Capitol Police who had jurisdiction over the capitol lawn where most of the event was held from 18:00 to 21:00.

I went to church by myself on Sunday after dropping of a couple of families in DC at the World War II Memorial for them to tour DC on their own. I met up with the rest of the group at Chau's place at 13:00 after church for the mandatory BBQ luncheon with all the other VANG volunteers. The group went to tour DC aftwards. I was supposed to meet Patricia for dinner but she overslept and didn't call me back in time so I went out for dinner with the big group at Cafe Asia.

Monday, I dropped off Amy at the Renaissance Mayflower before heading over to the hill to make congressional visits on my own. After I was done with the Senate side, I went over to the Rayburn House Office Building for a congressional luncheon sponsored by the Viet Heritage Society before continuing with my visits on the House side. The rest of the group tour DC some more and we met back at the Renaissance Mayflower around 16:00 to get ready for the gala. Had a really good time and meeting a lot of military officers and enlisted personnels of Vietnamese descent from every branch of the armed services. Met with Mr. ThaiTang, the designer for the 40th anniversary model of the Ford Mustang. Also got to see a lot of the film makers and actresses whom I met a couple weeks ago at the ViFF in Orange County.

We were almost late for our flight out of Dulles this morning. We woke up late, got to the airport late, the lines at the security checkpoints were long. We had to run to catch the shuttle from the main terminal to the G terminal and got on the plane less than 5 minutes before take off. God had mercy on me because I dropped my boarding pass along the way but Tam picked up for me.