He says: It's been an intense few days of travel. A mere 48 hours ago we were in Australia, then yesterday we spent the day in Singapore, and now (after a crazy seven hour turbulent flight) we made it to Beijing.

My only real job in planning this trip, other than booking our hotels, was to organize a ride to see The Great Wall. It was on my Nicholson/Freeman list (aka bucket list) and I did plenty of research on the web to find the right driver to take us there and decided on a car company that had great reviews on Trip Advisor.

However, it was a disaster from the start. I had to send a deposit to the car company when we were in Ottawa, and the transfer never went through because the bank put the wrong address. After four trips to the bank and multiple emails to the tour company it was finally resolved. We were confirmed to have a driver take us from the airport to the Great Wall upon our arrival.

Looking back, we should have cut our losses there. But I was determined everything would work out, so we soldiered on.

Cut to our arrival in Beijing, the driver was waiting with a sign with my name on it (things were starting to look up) and I waved. He came over and I introduced myself. He responded he didn't speak English. Uh oh...After guiding us towards the garage he put me on the phone with the person at the tour company I'd been corresponding with via email. She recommended that we not go to the Great Wall because it would be closed by the time we get there. According to the web, the Wall closed at 6pm. It was a 60km drive away. Our flight had arrived 45 minutes late and the time was now 430pm. 60km in 90 minutes? Piece of cake, right? Wrong. It turned out our driver didn't really know how to get there and was asking for directions from strangers, gas station attendants, and stray dogs along the way. The dream of standing on the Great Wall was dying before my eyes with each minute that passed. By the time the clock in the car reached 555pm and the driver was pulled over on the side of the road thinking about what turn to make next, I knew we were experiencing a Wally World moment. It's when the Griswolds drove all the way across the US to visit an amusement park that, unbeknownst to them, is closed for renovations. The Great Wall was my Wally World. By the time we reached the Wall, the parking lot was empty, the shops lining the entrance were boarded up, and we were clearly out of luck. We did manage to snap some photos of the wall in the distance, which was still pretty cool. We also saw a dog whose owner had sheered it to look like a lion. Genius!

I take great pride in finding affordable options in the heart of each city we visit. By using a combo of Trip Advisor reviews and Expedia I usually find some gems. However, there is always an exception, and it happened in Beijing. Our hotel, the Shatan, was a giant dump. I knew we were in trouble when, at check-in, the clerk said our room had no windows. I guess I had mistakenly ordered a cave? The fun continued this morning when I woke up and walked to the bathroom only to step in a giant puddle on the carpeted floor. Lovely. I had no idea where the leak was coming from, but there was also a sopping towel outside our door taking the brunt of another leak. The only redeeming feature of our hotel was that they changed the carpet in the elevator everyday - we could tell this because each carpet had the day of the week on it. When we arrived yesterday it read Wednesday, this morning they changed it to a Thursday carpet. I really want to get these carpets for our car at home.

Beijing is clearly booming, there were cranes everywhere, and not the paper variety. It was really fun to walk around and see Tiennommen Square and the Forbidden City. A return visit down the road may be in order...just with a different hotel and driver.

She says: As our life feels like the Amazing Race this summer, we regularly refer to the show, reflecting on how we'd be doing. Well, if it somehow managed NOT to be an elimination round in Singapore and we were saved, we DEFINITELY would have been saying goodbye to Phil Keoghan in Beijing. Timing did not work out for us at all. Luckily, we kept it together and wouldn't have been one of those teams that melts down terribly on the show and ends up divorced thirty seconds later. We were do exhausted, the wrong turns, closed gates and stoic security guards seemed vaguely hilarious.

Matt did get to see the Great Wall, though not set foot on it. Like he says, someday we'll have to come back. Unravelled that you can see the thing from space, but once we were within 20 km, it took our driver an extra hour to find it.

After our hilariously disappointing glimpse at the Wall (so close we could nearly spit on it), we drive into town. I exclaimed "Oh wow!" while looking out the window. Matt said something along the lines of how much cooler it is to see something like the Great Wall in real life and how it looked even better than he thought, craning his neck for a look out the back windshield. I had to tell him I was reacting to the super cute stray dogs that were crossing the street in an adorable pack of three.

The stray digs in and around Beijing were the cutesy little mutts. They walk with such purpose and I wanted to adopt at least sixteen.

Arriving into the downtown after dark, from an air conditioned car, we got a sterilized first look at Beijing. Once we were dropped at Hotel Shatang, we were into the thick of things and Beijing really came to life. Matt picked this particular hovel, er hotel because of its "great location" close to the Forbidden City (closed of course, by the time we arrived). Unfortunately, due to crappy directions (right, right, left, instead of three rights), we walked for more than forty minutes in the complete wrong direction. We found a friendly musician who got us back on track eventually.

Our walk in the wrong direction did take us through some interesting areas, and I crouched under cars to see street cats, had my heart broken by the tiniest, loneliest looking street puppy, Matt joined a group of women in a street dance, we saw lots of Chinese men exposing midriffs, tons of sidewalk badminton and the curious restful pose of Beijing, squatting. Whether chatting with a friend, in the phone, playing dice or waiting for a bus, people here of all ages squat down on sidewalks and street corners.

We has been told of a street market to find dinner. Matt spoke of a "Great Wall of hunger" and wanted to eat some Chinese food.

We had a cab driver take us to a street market, which we were surprised to find nestled right in with the chic shopping street.

For once it was I who lost my appetite as we saw all manner of meat on a stick - from unidentifiable lumps of red and brown to full octopuses, beetles, grasshoppers and even coiled, skinned snakes, heads intact, I felt my vegetarian hangover kick in.

We ended up eating in a restaurant with huge tanks of live seafood on display and several ways of serving turtle on the menu. We played it safe with streamed buns, fried rice, noodles and chicken. I've never seen Matt eat with such gusto. His chopsticks flew from plate to plate to plate non stop for a good ten minutes. His first bite of chicken however, contained a bone and at the huge cracking sound, his eyes popped open wide and I burst into hysterics that I couldn't contain. It took me several breath to get put the question "Bone or tooth?". Matt spot the chicken into the ubiquitous hot towel and found it to be a bone. My picky husband would normally be totally turned off eating by that, but was so hungry he ate nearly the entire plate of chicken. His enthusiastic eating drew a crowd as there was always at least one waitress hovering at his elbow, staring, and we were at a window seat, and people kept coming up and looking at us, as though we were on display. I guess we kind of were.

I'm pretty sure we will be charged three times for the meal, as the language barrier and a malfunctioning VISA machine caused some confusion at the end of it.

Bellies full and Matt calculating how long food poisoning would take to kick in (spoiler alert: it didn't), we took a three wheeled car (and did not tip it) to see Tianamen Square.

It was very peaceful at night aside from the matching guards, and the strain guards and the police trucks driving down the sidewalk.

On our taxi ride back to our hotel, we realized how badly we'd gone astray and how close we actually were to the Forbidden City. We had a lovely stroll along the moat with the full moon and then realized it was nearly midnight and we had a cab booked for 3:30 am.

We hit our twin beds at the hotel, and our overtired selves turned into sleepover mood, chatting and giggling.

Getting up at the butt crack of dawn was not easy and finding out that our plane had a four hour delay was almost heartbreaking. Luckily, the lounge had mini bedrooms and we snoozed off the hours leading up to our flight. As much as we would have liked to see the city in the light, and wished that we could have headed back to the Great Wall, we needed to catch some zzzs.

We are now enjoying some after lunch Swiss chocolates on our glorious Swiss Air flight to Zurich. The ten hour flight has time travelled us back another six hours and we will be getting in this afternoon. That's Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, Beijing and Zurich; five cities, three continents in four days AND we still like each other. Maybe we WOULD still be on The Amazing Race.