Our 1st Chinese Road Trip

This week we took our first road trip. Andy and the kids had the entire week off (for National Day) and we decided to see a bit more of China than just our own city. Yes, you did read that right - they had the week off for National DAY. I should clarify that the holiday is actually celebrated Wednesday through the weekend, but many companies (Andy's included) opt to work the weekend before so that they can then have 7 days in a row off. Anyway, we left Monday morning for Hangzhou and then went on to the Yellow Mountains. I will be doing a blog-o-rama tonight and describing all our adventures. Some memorable moments of our drive:

• Becca LOVES to play games while traveling (particularly the A-B-C game when you find all the letters of the alphabet, which is a bit of a challenge in China). She decided to make up her own game.... she called out, "Let's play, I spy the pollution." Now we are driving through factory after factory, so trying hard not to laugh I asked her to clarify. She told me that she would say if she saw something polluting the earth and we had to try and find it. Needless to say, the possibilities were many. Andy and I think it is ironic that we moved to China with our environmentally conscious 7-year-old!
• While driving from Hangzhou to the hotel we were staying at in the Yellow Mountains, we got really lost. We had directions, but the road that we were supposed to take was under construction. Now I am talking about driving 5 miles on a dirt road and passing cows (in the road) lost! Andy and I each were envisioning spending the night in our van parked in a field somewhere! Thankfully, we backtracked and found our way back to the highway. We then asked the toll operator how to get to the city of our hotel and found out that it would be only about 30 kilometers on the highway. Let me just state for the record that we are grateful that we had already started learning Chinese because between our limited Chinese and the man's little bit of English we were able to understand the directions. I also think that we are going to seriously think about investing in GPS before we go on another road trip. It is one thing to get lost when the signs are in English (and almost all of the highway signs are in both Chinese and English), but imagine being in a small town and all the signs are only in Chinese. Definitely adds a bit of challenge!