China - Oct 26 - Nov 9, 2010

Well, we're off again! We pretty much swore that one trip to Asia was enough after the brutally long trip to Bangkok last time. So much for that. A tiny ad for this trip appeared in the Toronto Star and we quickly decided that a walk on the Great Wall was obligatory in our lives and the rest as they say, is history.
As a general outline for this trip, we do the following:
*Fly Toronto to LA, LA to Beijing
*We have five days in and around Beijing, including the Great Wall
*Then we take one of 3 internal flights, to Xian - see the map below for our in China route.

*After the Terracotta Warriors in Xian, we're off to Chongqing and the start of a cruise down the Yangtze River - that itinerary is shown below

*Then we fly to Shanghai and area for the remainder of our stay
*Home via Chicago
That's it, in a nutshell. As we anticipate our departure for this trip, we are starting to realize how jam packed these 15 days will be.
So, as we sit at the airport awaiting our flight, I'll tell you about our adventures thus far.
At about 10:00 this morning we discovered that our flight to Chicago that would connect us to a flight to Beijing, was cancelled due to an extreme storm that apparently was affecting 24 states. At this point they were prepared to book us on a flight tomorrow, which of course would screw up the first day of our China tour. There was no guarantee that Chicago would be out of the woods by then, so with the kind help of American airlines personnel, we spent the next hour or so pursuing alternatives. Chicago is the only American Airlines portal to China, so it meant skipping to another airline. In the end, to get to China before our tour began and to avoid Chicago, we were obliged to fly to LA and then pick up an Air China flight to Beijing. It meant being in the air longer and arriving a scant 3 or 4 hours before the tour begins, but the prospect of at least getting there is good, so here we go.