Great Wall of China

      Today we woke up excited to go to the Great Wall of China, one of the great wonders of the world. We opened our hotel curtain this morning and witnessed a beautiful site... the smoggy pollution seemed to have disappeared and visibility was amazing.  Little did we know that we could actually see the Water Cube and the Bird's Nest, two of the sites of the 2008 Olympics right out our hotel window.  Apparently, the city sent up some sort of "weather bomb" and manufactured rain or wind to get rid of the pollution. This made us very excited to spend the day outdoors at the WALL!  We boarded a bus at around 8:00am, which would have been around 6:00pm your time last night, for an hour and half drive out of the city to the Great Wall at Mutianyu Village.  The Great Wall was built originally many years ago to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire against intrusions by various nomadic groups. The majority of the Great Wall was built during the Ming Dynasty, a long, long, long time ago. It is actually high up on a mountain so there were a few choices on how to get up there. 1. hike 2. open sky lift 3. an enclosed cable car, we chose the last choice. It got us up to the Wall very quickly and we were then able to walk for a good mile or more along the top of the wall. It was a pretty tough job. The Great Wall has many hills and slopes through out and was good exercise.  Can you imagine what a job it would have been building such a tremendous wall high up on a hill that many years ago? It was hard just walking, let alone hauling the stone to build it. We had the same choices to get back down the mountain from the Wall plus one more...
a toboggan!!  I, of course, chose this route! It was so much fun.