March 11, 2015

Definitely deserving of a blog post all its own…we went to the Great Wall of China today. It was pretty awesome. Certainly the highlight for us so far. We took the train to the Badaling section of the wall. This is a very well preserved section that has been kept up to keep its original look. I guess that makes it a little less authentic, but we were still impressed. Standing at the top is pretty amazing to see the wall as far across the mountains as you can see and to think that it was built basically by hand all those years ago. We decided that we certainly wouldn’t want to be the ones to do the building.

The day started off a little rocky when the train we planned to take was not running, so we had to wait about two hours at the train station for the next train. It was a bit of a wait, but since the tickets were only $1.00 each, we definitely couldn’t complain. We got up to the Badaling section after passing a few other sections first…some were well kept, other crumbling. It was cool to see both types of sections. The little “town” (mostly souvenir stands) was pretty cool and we had some really good sweet fried bread for a snack before we got started.

The actual wall is HUGE and STEEP!!! We started out walking up the South side and it was so steep…we were pretty sure our legs were going to give out. After we made it to the top (over 300 steps and tons of inclines), we took some pictures, bought Hayden a super-touristy “I Climbed the Great Wall” medal, then headed back down. At the bottom, Hayden announced that he wasn’t tired yet and wanted to walk up the North side too. Since we probably won’t get another chance to come back, we decided to suck it up and keep climbing.

A total of 724 stairs up later, we were at the top of the other side and it was just as cool.

We only stayed at the top here for a few minutes because we wanted to make it back for the 3:00 train. We made it back with 5 minutes to spare and got back to the hotel by about 5:30. We are all ready to pass out and I’m pretty sure that both Adam and I will be unable to walk tomorrow!