Tired but happy

Sorry for the lack of posting, I've been oh, so exhausted since we arrived.  We're close now, but the kids have been having a tough time sleeping through the night...

Today was a wonderful and exhausting day.  We woke to blue skies and slightly cooler temperatures for our day at the Great Wall.  Pete, who came along with us and served as our guide for the day said that he had never been to the wall with such high visibility.  We were more thankful than ever for the torrential downpour we had Thursday night (seriously, I've only ever seen rain like that once before in my life and it lasted over an hour) that knocked the "haze" that clouded the city when we arrived.  

 The last of the stairs that lead up to the wall.

While this was my and Ian's third visit to see the wall, we've been fortunate enough to be able to see different sections each time.  Mutainyu was our destination for today.  We opted to take the cable car up to the top and it was worth the $10 per adult ticket (kids under 1.2 meters ride free).  Our kids thought it was as fun as a roller coaster.

We were thankful for the light crowds at this section.  MUCH easier to take fun photos!

This section of the wall provides insane views of the wall snaking off the mountain ridges in several directions as there are "branches" off the main wall coming in at this particular section.  As I said before, the clear skies today made it breathtaking.  We hiked around for as long as we felt was reasonable with lots of kids and then took our roller coaster back down.  There is a toboggan available at that section of the wall, but as kids were a big part of our travel party, we opted to skip it.  Gotta save something for later, right?

Me and my honey.

Hear no evil..

The wall snaking off in the distance.

We left the wall with tired legs ~ the walk from the parking lot to the cable car is pretty long ~ but were "tired happy."

Next came the Ming Tombs.  Or one section of them as there are several.  It was one thing in the area that Ian and I had not seen and we were interested in going.  Interestingly enough, it was designed by the same emperor that designed the Forbidden City, so it was very familiar.  You pretty much could have lifted out the buildings that were there and placed them in the Forbidden City and no one would really be the wiser.  However the history inside along with some of the artifacts were pretty interesting.  Unfortunately we didn't have time to walk "the sacred road" so we missed the camel statue featured in Big Bird in China.  Kylie ~ and myself if I'm going to be perfectly honest ~ was a little disappointed about that.  While I'm glad to have seen the tombs area, and the drive out there was amazingly beautiful, in retrospect I think I would have opted to come back after lunch instead of going on out to the tombs.  They were much further apart than we anticipated and it made for a much longer day than we imagined.

First building inside the temple.

The view from the top at the tombs.  The scenery was amazing!

Not quite what they meant by "how to train your dragon"...

For dinner we decided we were tired enough to pass up McD's for peanut butter bagels, beef jerky and leftover noodles and jiao zi.  Somewhat strange combo, but it worked for us in our tired state.

Tomorrow we fly out to Daniel's province!!!