Almost Famous...

Well folks, we made it back safely from our first official adventure in China (besides me getting pushed onto the plane in Chicago). I found this great website, cyclechina.com and thought we might investigate this company by taking just a simple day trip to one of the water towns (a la Venice) partially on a bike. Of course the pictures look good on the website, people smiling, etc… I was even more nervous being in charge of the trip because a colleague of Will’s (Microsoft manager) Paul was in town and wanted to get together. I’m trying to be a good Expat wife and help assist Will in moving up the ranks at Dell, so I didn’t want to end up on 3 rusted bikes in the middle of nowhere.

We met up at 8am Sunday and we were pleasantly surprised that there would be a total of 8 of us on the trip. We met folks from Scotland, Russia (who works at Intel), and several people from the Philappines. Our guide spoke fairly good English and so we were off on an air conditioned bus to our designated drop off point about an hour outside of Shanghai. We were supposed to have van support all the way and for the most part we did. The bikes were not rusted out pieces of tin, but decent mountain bikes (note to self since I’m not sitting on my ass this morning – to buy padded bike shorts for the next adventure).

We made it to our destination in about 3 ½ hours, had lunch, took a little boat tour – got a taste of the local atmosphere (got to see kids peeing in the water a few doors down from someone washing the dishes…and why not…I just wish I could take a swab of their stomach flora). Will and I bought some BEAUTIFUL scrolls/water colors of the four seasons (you’ll just have to come visit) – and to top it all off –we had several locals come and take OUR picture.