My summer so far…

It is only a month after school has ended and I have already been on a new adventure.  Four days after school had ended I jetted off to Bejing, China with my school (Pinewood) to be followed by Xi’an, Zhangjiajie, and Shanghai. The whole trip took about 10 days but it felt like we were gone for much longer.

Out of everywhere that we traveled to a couple of places stuck out. The first one was when we were getting ready to travel down the toboggan on the great wall of China when it began to rain. The slide had been shut down because of the storm and the rain was so bad that even the cable car was shut down (it even started to hail!).  We were “stranded” on top of the Great Wall for about 2 hours until the storm calmed down enough for us to go back down. In the end I feel like the story of being stuck up on top of the Great Wall while it was hailing was an even better experience than I could have pondered. Another place that I enjoyed was walking down about 999 steps to a plaza after taking the world’s longest cable car ride (30 minutes!). We found out about halfway down the staircase that there was an escalator… Which would have saved a lot of pain and me slipping once.

The last few days we were in China I felt like the group I was traveling with became one big family. We all hiked mountains, tried new things, and experienced a new country together. I am glad of how much closer I had become with my fellow classmates and teachers and I would like to travel with them again.

Above: Hailing on top of the Great Wall!

Above: Bottom of the 999 steps.

Above: The view from the top of the world’s longest cable car ride.

Above: A photo of me on the glass bridge

Above: Me at the terra-cotta warriors

Above: A photo of me atop the citywide bridge in X’ian

Above: A photo from a little garden in the middle of a market in Shanghai.

How We Got Here

The genesis of this trip came about pretty fast. As noted in the last blog Kim and I slipped off to Iceland while Sydney was on a school service trip to Nicaragua. Syd was not allowed to take any electronics and only found out about our trip when she returned. Although she initially expressed some displeasure she was ok with it quickly. She thought we were at home taking care of the cats she said. Since she was a good sport about it we decided to take her to Iceland this year. She also has expressed interest in London and England for a while, Iceland being en-route made the trip complete. Icelandair recently restarted service out of San Francisco making the trip that much easier.