China Day 3

Another busy day with an early start. The first stop was at the Badaling section of the Great Wall, about two hours outside of Beijing. I could fill this blog post with just pictures from there but I'll give you a sampling instead. It was another beautiful day, although the pollution was beginning to build. There were lots of people, including a tour group of 700 (!), but, like everywhere you go, the farther you walk, the less people you see. We left our guide David at the bottom and Leslie strolled around on her own while Lee, Cady and I headed up.

This section of the Wall is the same one I went to 14 years ago with Dad and Leslie, which I was happy about. I liked remembering that day with Dad and how much he enjoyed his visit. He and another older gentleman had a brief conversation, that included Dad speaking English and the other man speaking Chinese, whereupon they decided they were the oldest people walking on the wall that day. At the time Dad was a spritely 76 years old, as was his acquaintance.

Another thing that added to my enjoyment was watching how much Lee was enjoying himself. We were at The Great Wall. How cool is that?! I think it was better than he expected, so full of history and amazing workmanship. The views were incredible and the act of walking up all those stairs was awe inspiring.

We enjoyed ourselves so much we've decided to go back in June. We have an overnight layover in China on our return trip to the US so we're going to have our guide pick us up early in the morning and we'll head back to Badaling and climb the section across the river and be back in time for our flight in the afternoon.