So, the flight from Kansas City to Dallas was more or less uneventful and stress free, except for the part where Kathy went missing when they wouldn't let her take her allegedly oversize carry-on onto the plane. When we arrived in Dallas, we claimed our bags from American bag claim and took the shuttle to the international terminal to check in at Korean Air.
The "fun" started almost immediately. We learned at the counter that when we renewed our passports, the "Visa Approval Letter" supplied by our Vietnamese travel agent was no longer valid, because the passport numbers changed. Accordingly, we couldn't board our KAL flight. After a phone call to Vietnam, we discovered that since it was 10:30 P.M. in Hanoi, the Vietnamese travel agent couldn't do anything to address the situation until government offices opened up in the morning - hours after our flight was due to depart.
As it turns out, it is possible to get somebody in the US to issue a visa letter on an expedited basis, provided you pay the appropriate "expedited" processing fee. Two hours later, after several false starts involving letters addressed to the wrong arrival airports, we finally had our new visa letters in hand, just in time to be rushed through security and hustled to the gate as the plane was finishing the boarding process.
All's well that ends well. We probably didn't need the huge jolt of adrenaline so early in the trip, but we'll now have 19 hours in the air to calm down!
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