It started with a picture...

...and ended with over 1,000! Exhausted and teary-eyed, we are home safe from a week in China. Seven planes in seven days is my limit. We had quite an adventure - nineteen hour days, pollution, frog legs - that I cannot wait to share.

I used Pinterest to create our China itinerary. Pinterest with a dash of TripAdvisor. I am the planner of this adventuring duo, but I was feeling some pressure to make this trip spectacular. It may be the only time we make it to the Communist country so I wanted to make sure it knocked my socks off. But gave them back, of course. I like my socks.

I enlisted Dustin to find activities that he would be interested in doing. And that's when he found the picture.


From Pinterest

The "Bridge of Immortals" in Huangshan, China. We decided immediately that we had to see this area and thus it created our travel itinerary. Unfortunately Huangshan is in southern China and is not near any of the major cities. After a few days of trying to sort out the logistics of traveling domestically I was seriously considering scrapping the whole idea.

Dustin and I rarely do guided tours. We love the flexibility of being able to travel at our own speed. We also love exploring cities on foot. So many of our discoveries have been while wandering around (sometimes lost!) in the evenings or between tourist sights. After building the itinerary, I decided to use a tour company that would provide an English-speaking guide during our travels. My Mandarin consists of foul language learned from Firefly so having an intermediary sealed the deal. Price tag: a steal!

So off to China we go..... not. We were scheduled to fly early Saturday morning, but late Friday we discovered our flight was being delayed. Very very last minute we bought different tickets so we would make our international connecting flight.

After twelve hours of traveling and some awesome airplane food (Thanks, Delta!) we arrived in Beijing. Our tour guide, Sherry, met us at the airport with our driver and swiftly tucked us in to our hotel for the night. I was quite exhausted.

A bit unnerving...

In our hotel we found some interesting things. The bathroom had a scale. In fact, every hotel we stayed at in country had a scale. Additionally, we found the two of the above mask in each room. In case of...????