Vacation Update: Cumberland Island
Hello, my peeps. 🙂 As many/most of you know, I’ve been on vacation outside China for the past several weeks (since second week in April, to be precise), and have been mostly visiting friends and family in the US, with a lovely side trip to family and friends in Germany and London, and coffee at the Zurich airport with Carrie! (So great to see you again, and to meet the hubbie finally, Carrie!)
I’ve already seen most or many of the folks I know read this journal regularly, so I thought those of you who shared our lovely family reunion for Mom’s 70th birthday down on Cumberland Island, Georgia would particularly enjoy some of these shots. Those who didn’t join us should know this is one of the most lovely and relaxing places I’ve ever been. The inn we stayed at, while far from inexpensive, is deeply relaxing and gracious, and the national seashore (most of the island) is wild, beautiful, and endlessly peaceful.
I’ve not taken shots of the other places I’ve been on my trip, and rather doubt I’ll be taking or posting many/any more before my return to China in a few more weeks. We’ll see what comes up — there may be a few from coastal California, where I’ll be for about two weeks; or possibly from the Denver area and the Rockies, where I am at the moment enjoying the gracious hospitality of good friends Christian and Laura and looking forward to seeing Lisa and her family shortly. Hope you enjoy these shots, everyone.
Wildlife @ Cumberland Island
Look hard and you’ll see an eastern diamondback rattlesnake in a defensive position, and you can even make out the head ready to strike if necessary, in the shot with the mottled leaves on the ground. Look to the right of the sea turtle (still covered with seaweed brought up with her when she came on land) and you’ll see the little pit she dug and into which she just laid some eggs.
And a few shots of Savannah
As long as I’m putting up a few vacation photos, I’ll also post these of Savannah, which is indeed a really fun city, probably about as fun as Georgia gets. 🙂 The founder of the girl scouts was born there, hence the pic of Mom with the plaque next to the house where she was born.
Hiking the Great Wall
Some of my friends seemed to think posting shots of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City as my last entry before going on my seven-week vacation was a bit too predicable (you know who you are, Gary), so I’ve decided to speed the posting of these shots I took on a wonderful Great Wall hike yesterday. The Great Wall stretches from Shanhaiguan on the Yellow Sea northeast of Beijing, to Jiayuguan in Gansu on the edge of the Tarim basin, 2700 kilometers to the west. The earliest sections (not near Beijing, I think) date from the Warring States Period, between 481 and 221 BC. The wall as we know it today was fully restored and re-built or built in the early 1400s, the early Ming period when Beijing was the new capital of the empire.
Around Beijing are many restored sections of the wall, where authorities
have fully and carefully restored extended sections so that tourists can
come and visit and get a sense of what the wall was at its height. All the
tourist and travel brochure shots you’ll see are most likely taken at one of
these sections, like Badaling, Simatai, Jinshanling or Mutianyu. True confession: I’ve not yet been to any of those sections. I’ve only done hikes like this, either around or on top of some of the older and more decrepit sections. Some time I’m sure I’ll go to one of the big-name sections, but for now I love the wall as I know it, crumbling and atmospheric, running along the ridgeline in the steep, rocky hills around Beijing.
A few notes on the next three shots: one is shown through a cherry tree, just to note that spring is finally slowly arriving in Beijing, and hills may be a touch less brown and gray in the next few weeks; another shows a crumbling tower on a rise, with a clear section of wall on a ridgeline in
the hazy background: that’s the restored Mutianyu section, and there’s another view of it with an explanation just afterwards. The other shot you have to look at fairly closely, to see the nubs of the towers along the ridgeline. Note that the wall seems always to follow the ridgeline, for good defensive reasons. This hike is called the 15 towers hike, because we pass 15 old watchtowers on our hike along the wall.
Looking at Mutianyu Section
Here we are looking across the valley at Mutianyu, one of the wall sections near Beijing that has been fully restored and is now a major tourist
attraction with chair lifts to help people get up to the wall and back down. If you look closely, you can clearly see how much more defined the wall is there than in the more decrepit sections we were hiking.
(so much world, so little time....) 