Rick and Mei-O's Trip to Beijing and Chengde, China
October 15-October 25, 2002

In a courtyard in the Qing Dynasty Summer Palace (Bishushanzhuang) in Chengde, China. Yep, that's snow!

This, our second trip to China in just about a year (see our web site for last year's trip) turned out to be a surprisingly fun time. We weren't going with a tour group this time (well, we were going with a tour group, but we planned on not staying with them after the visit to to the Great Wall on day two. We would head out on our own and make our own itinerary.) We planned to tour Beijing the first seven days, then head to Chengde, about 200 miles north of Beijing, to visit a Qing Dynasty summer palace and numerous temples that surrounded the palace. We didn't quite know what to expect, but everything (well, almost everything) went quite smoothly. We went with a couple of friends, Kuan and Pei, and, thanks to Pei's advance research (especially her discovery of many great restaurants!), we all had an amazing vacation.

So, without a lot of narrative, here are a bunch of pictures of our trip:

  • the first eight pages1 are basically pictures of us in various interesting places
  • the next 15 pages (9 through 23) are many more interesting pictures without us in any of them, in chronological order
  • the last 5 pages (24 through 28) are 'left overs', more interesting pictures that I added later, in no certain order
  • and here are a bunch of miscellaneous items from the trip
And finally, here is a link to a detailed day-by-day description of our activities during our 11 day odyssey, our trip journal. Enjoy!

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