We want to say a quick hello from Toyko. Karyn, Russ and the kids met us here 3 days ago and it has been a whirlwind of sightseeing since they arrived. After eight months of deciding what to do and where to go we passed the baton to Russ and let him be our troop leader. The rain has barely slowed us down as he has back up agendas for bad weather. Yesterday we found a Hello Kitty stick, but we won't settle. We are searching for Godzilla on a stick. We are all so ...

We had a great sendoff in Beijing before heading to Japan. The night before we left, friends we met in Yangshuo, Ben and Tammy, who live in Beijing took us out to dinner. We tried many new foods including stinky tofu, screw, dragon beans, salted duck, brown sugar lotus root and lily and yam congee. It was a great way to end our visit to China as once again it showed us that there are some really wonderful people around the world that will do great things for y...

We've had an incredible few days in Beijing since arriving via the overnight train from Xi'an. Probably the most noticeable thing to us is that the citizens of Beijing smile a lot - at least more than the other cities we've been in. They are laughing and having a good old time here in this city of 22,000,000. No, I didn't add too many zeroes. Our days have been packed with sightseeing to take it all in. We've hit the Temple of Heaven (one of four massive te...

The pollution has dropped to 393, since our arrival in Xi'an. That number still falls in the "severely polluted" realm, but doesn't have the nuclear fall-out look the city had the night we arrived. We are able to breathe (sort of) and have not let it stop us from seeing the sights. Our first day here we aggressively rode bikes along the historic city wall. While it was fun to go on tandem bikes with the kids, riding in the smog about put me over the edge. We ca...

Today has been a long day of travel. I'm writing this from the airport in Chengdu during our layover on our way to Xi'an. I probably won't be posting this until we get in late tonight to our hotel. We left our hotel in Lijiang this morning at 7am after staying up way too late. Seems like we've become night owls since we've gotten to China. Our first leg departed Lijiang at 9am and we arrived here at Chengdu at 10:45am. Our flight to Xi'an is not until 7:4...