Day 3 adventure, Sunday

Today we were picked up at the hotel around 8am and we headed for a picnic "in a park in the mountains." We had no idea where we were headed really.  Sunny picked up snacks and said we were stopping for Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way.  The ride was 2 hours, right past the great wall where we were yesterday.  We stopped in a town called Yanqing which was beautiful and surrounded by mountains.  A large public park in the middle of the town was bordered by shopping centers and a walmart and KFC. There were so many people and bicycles outside the stores.  When we got out of the van, it was very obvious that most had never seen families that looked like ours before.  In particular, I am sure that many had never seen white people.  Interesting being the minority.  We had as much fun with is as we could.

 

The park wound up being this HUGE mountainous gorge.  It reminded me very much like Whistler in Canada, with a glacier lake 600 meteres deep.  The sun was warm but it was very windy and cold when the wind blew.  It was also periodically hailing through the sunshine which was odd. We took a boat ride through the gorge and it was awesome.  The girls got to sit in the wheelhouse. There were many other tourists there but I think this is still off season for them.  They had capacity to accomodate many more people than us.  To get our boat, we had to take 5 or 6 escalators up the side of a mountain> the excalators were hidden by a huge dragon. So, technicaly we were inside the dragon. We ate our picnic lunch inside the dragon too.  I am still not sure why Sunny chose that to be our lunch spot, in between escalator landings, but we went with it. The boatride was sometimes cold but mostly ok and really beautiful .  The boat drops you at a different place that you were picked up and there was some hiking to do to get to the next boat landing to get back.  There were several temples along the mountains at the gorge so we picked a large one and visited for a while.  The girls rang big bell and there was incense burning everywhere .  Sunny know all about the different gods and stops to pay respect to each one.  There are many.  When we left the temple, we went into this cheesy flower cave thing. It was a tunnel dug through the mountain with artificial greenery and flowers and animals all through it. Joyce and I laughed the whole time.  At least it was warm in there.

 

When we exited the tunnel we had a choice of walking down bunches of steps to get back or to take this bobsled like slide carved into the side of the mountain so we did the latter and it was very fun.  Sunny took the girls back up for a second time.  Maggie went down with Grace the first time, and alone the second time.  She is still so tiny that sometimes she had to hand push the sled because she wasnt heavy enough.  The girls fell in love with 2 scruffy puppies at the gorge and wanted to bring them home.  The slide and the puppies were the highlight of the day for them.  We were very tired and ready for something hot by about 2pm so we headed out, and stopped at that same KFC for coffee and , well, icecream on the way back to the City. 

 

We got back to the hotel and let the girls suit up for the hotel pool.  They want to go to the pool every day.   We found a pizzahut about a block from the hotel and went there for dinner.  It was the nicest pizza hut we had ever seen and it had a full meu. The food was very good. Our waiter was coming to George Washington university in the fall and spoke better english than me.

 

We were back at the hotel in bed by 9pm and slept till 730 the next am.