No early start for us this morning--we were a little bit lazy and slept in till 6:30! The bed here is heavenly--the first good bed we've had in 3 weeks. We had breakfast at our guesthouse, they put out a pretty nice spread. Remembering how cold we were yesterday we bundled up before we left to walk to the subway. By the time we got to our destination I'd already shed one layer, thankfully it was much warmer here today. Our first trip on the Beijing S...

We woke this morning in Datong to snow! A light dusting covered the roofs of the old hutong houses below our hotel window. We ate a quick breakfast of leftovers from our delicious dinner last night, packed up our bags and headed down to the lobby to check out and meet our driver. We'd so enjoyed our driver yesterday that we asked him if he would drive us to the airport this morning. We were very impressed that he had checked the time of our flight to Beij...

We woke up very early this morning, 4:30! Not sure why, maybe we were excited about our day today. It was another amazing travel day, we saw fascinating, incredible and beautiful historic sights today with our guide for the day, Nancy. She was a great guide; very friendly, knowledgeable and spoke excellent English. She and her driver picked us up at 8:00am on the dot, and we headed out of town to our first stop, the Hanging Monastery and Temple. It's about...

Dusty Datong Today was a travel day for us, we flew this morning from Taiyuan to Datong. Our flight was late leaving, but it was a short one on a very small jet--only 50 minutes. As we were descending into Datong we we shocked by how bad the air quality is here. I think it's mostly dust, but I'm sure some of it is smog, as the Datong's main economy is coal mining. We were also very surprised by the size of the airport--it's tiny! They actually locked the...

Gee, we didn't even have to get an early start this morning! Of course we still woke up early, but we relaxed in our room with a cup of coffee, checked our email, then went for breakfast at our guesthouse restaurant. We had packed up last night so we were ready and waiting when our driver showed up promptly at 10 am. We walked the couple of short blocks to his van, and we were off! Good bye Pingyao--what a lovely place. It was a pretty quick drive to our ...