Beijing and Shaghai

Getting ready for a 10 day trip to China in November to Beijing and Shanghai. Connie and I will be travelling with my daughter Sarah and Sister-in-law Maria and will be meeting my nephew Ben who will be our tour guide. I'm sure he's thrilled! Ben lives in Shanghai and will be flying to Beijing to join us at our hotel. After 6 days in Beijing we will then fly to Shanghai where we (hopefully) will join Maria's brother Bob and family for a Thanksgiving dinner at their home. Lots of sites to see and not so much time to do it! Everybody is pretty excited! Our Visa's are in order to enter China - Americans are required to have a visa that is good for 90 days visit to China. We're waiting for our tickets to arrive for our Air China flight from San Francisco to Beijing. Smartours (whom we traveled to Thailand in the past offered this trip and we couldn't pass up the deal). The price of the tour and inter-China transport was cheaper than just flying from Chicago to Beijing. Plus, we get 10 days lodging and some meals. They assure us that we do not have to travel with the tour group - merely present ourselves at the departure time to fly from Beijing to Shanghai. Thus Ben the travel guide! He's taken a lot of people to see the sites and I hope he's not too bored with doing it all again. Maria, who is an architect is quite interested in seeing the Olympic sites and there's a chance we can swim in "The Cube".

We'll be flying to San Francisco a day early to ease the pain of the 14 hour flight to China the next day. Sarah is a little apprehensive about the length of the flight (4 or 5 hours is her max. flight to date). I told her that it's not a fun thing to do but the rewards will be worth it. I'm sure we'll recover quite nicely. When we return we're going to spend another 2 days in S.F. to decompress from the trip before returning home. Keep watching for my many reports on activities while in China!