Trails 2 Travel

2nd best day of our trip (after the Great Wall) as the mountains and sites we saw this day were EPIC. but let's get things straight.. this day was a TONNNN of stairs. 

Day 3, ahh the most stressful day of them all. We were up and at Mcdonalds again for breakfast round 2. This time we avoided the sandwich all together and ordered the “big breakfast” which was basically the makings of a sandwich but with scrambled eggs and a hash brown. No ketch up in site and a little more food although it cost more than twice what the previous day had cost. We stopped at a store for some snacks and then checked out of our hotel and headed for the metro. Getting to the train station was relatively painless but once there… we were a bit lost.  We wandered to 3 different corners of it looking at the giant screens for our train number. The easiest way to think of it is like an airport and you have to look for your gate. Once you find your waiting room/”gate” you wait until about 30 minutes before departure when you “check in” and queue to go out to the platform. Once we managed to find our actual room and go through security, it was pretty easy and locating our seat

Let me start off... by apologizing about just how many photos are contained in this post. I could't choose favorites. When first planning our trip to China, I can’t tell you HOW many hours I spent agonizing over what section of the Great Wall to see. Do we visit the most popular one Badaling? Or the second most popular Mutainyu that is close to Beijing and has a cool Tobogan ride down? OR do we venture out further from the city to visit a less restored section, otherwise called the “wild” sections. There’s a section where the wall meets the sea (probably too far), a section with very scenic views of a lake and mountains, a moderate hiking section that was 50% resorted, or a HARD hike section where the wall is 100% wild. The pros of doing one of the first 2 is that we’d be able to combine the Great Wall with other cool historic sites like the Ming burial sites, temples, or sites in Beijing city. The cons would be they would likely be more busy (especially Badaling) and I li

Ok so here comes the first post about what can only be called an overwhelming trip to China! Our travel day started at the 0-Dark hundred hour of 4:30 to get to the airport for a 6:40 AM flight to San Francisco. Smooth 1.5 hour flight and a short 2 hour layover we were on our way again to Beijing. Both flights were on United and fairly smooth apart from getting 0 sleep since it was pretty much all during my normal waking hours. We arrived in Beijing just after 2 PM. Customs was pretty similar to any other passport control apart from the passport control kiosks also requesting all 10 of your finger prints.  Then you wait in a line with the kiosk receipt, go through passport control and customs. The process from getting off the plane to leaving the airport took just over an hour. (the line wasn’t too bad and we didn’t check bags) soo all in all not bad! We stopped at the first ATM in the airport we found to take out cash (which you need immediately to even leave the airport) then boug