travel in china
Hiking in LongSheng
With a return trip to Beijing for work, I flew out a couple of days early to visit the mountainous rice terrace area outside of Guilin with Adrian. This is the story of our journey. Friday morning we were picked up by our driver in the city of Lingui (just outside Guilin) around 8:15am, first … Continue reading
Yunnan Mancation
Driving to the ends of the earth is one good place to find some sense of adventure. When you drive to the end of the road, where the pavement or gravel ends and the trail begins your bound to find something interesting. Since August of last 2011, right after Seth and I’s successful climb of … Continue reading
Xi’an – An Ancient City
“Everyone loves the sound of a train in the distance” – Paul Simon We’ve taken the fast train to Nanjing but we’d yet to take a night train. Knowing our time in China was short we planned a long weekend trip to Xi’an and booked our tickets on the sleeper train from Beijing to Xi’an. … Continue reading
Best of May 2012
Another group of the best of photos for the Month of May. Time is flying by too quickly. Click through on any photo for more details and information. We had took a long weekend driving trip to Datong, camping at Miles 12th annual Father and Sons campout, a visit to the Great Wall. Photos below … Continue reading
Driving to Datong
I love road trips. Stac and I have been loading up the car and driving a 1000 miles on a weekend since the first days of our marriage when we were at school in Utah and we traipse through southern Utah and northern Arizona. We saw Monument Valley in our 4 door Toyota Corolla that … Continue reading
The good, the bad and the ugly
After talking to a close friends daughter last night via FB about our feelings living abroad (she nannies in Paris), it got me thinking. We were talking about our likes vs. dislikes about the cities we live in and also the things we know we are going to miss when we move back to the … Continue reading
Kiah
Kiah has been in Beijing with us for almost 4 months and when she returns to the states with us this month she will be going back to school and not returning to China with us. Lucky for us BYU-I only allows the students to go to two semesters and the University chooses. Some kids … Continue reading
Turning a corner, 6 months later
I just had my usual “loud” conversation with my mom on the phone this morning. I say loud because the connection is lousy in our apartment and because she is losing her hearing, two bad combinations make for a very long and comical conversation. I shouldn’t complain though because I really do value the time … Continue reading
Driving to Mongolia
I have friends who used to work in Alaska fish factories in the summers.  They would drive from Utah to Anchorage and we used to joke it was like Driving to Russia. It seemed an impossibly long distance to drive.  The phrase “Driving to Mongolia” conjures up similar notions and even though it’s a scant 450 … Continue reading
Guilin and Yangshuo
When you visualize the iconic images of China what do you think of? In the top 4 have to be Mao Zedong, The Forbidden City, The Great Wall and finally Guilin with its fantastic karst mountain topography. There is a common saying in Chinese : 桂林山水甲天下 : Gulin’s scenery is the most beautiful under heaven. … Continue reading