Home

Greetings All!  I am home.  I thought I was ready to come home but now I'm not so sure.  This cold or allergies that has plagued my trip is pretty bad.  Still coughing, congested, and, to top it off, I only slept 2 hrs in 24 on the way home and could only manage 6 hrs last night.  And I have to go to work tomorrow.  I don't even feel like dealing with laundry.  Maybe food.

I have a journal I've been keeping as posts to this blog, after the fact.  And over 200 pictures I just uploaded to my computer.  It's nice to be reunited with all it's capabilities.  If I can manage, I want to review the journal first and clean it up and fill in any gaps and thoughts.  I may post pics to this blog, or I may post them to my Apple space.  Either way, I'll try to get something together in the not-too-distant future to share my trip with you.

What this day before going back to work holds is uncertain at this point.  Probably a nap! And I don't nap.  Maybe work on the photos.  Now that I'm home, I am realizing the amazingness of the trip.  We covered a lot of ground, saw so much, about which I had a lot of impressions and thoughts.  We did it with a wonderful lecturer who really added a lot to the trip, a great tour guide who was with us every step of the way and took great care of us, and really nice, if difficult, bunch of people.  Let's face it, most of the greatest people are tough.  I think I made some friends, some of whom are now in Hong Kong.

China is a really interesting place.  The old of Beijing, mixed with the new, the neon lights, the pollution.  The even worse pollution of Xi'an, with the 8th wonder of the world, the Terracotta Warriors.  To smell the clay ..... The magnificence of the Yangtze River, the controversy of the relocated towns that could never have happened anywhere but in a country where the government has such control over the people.  The gorges are so beautiful.  The Three Gorges dam is an engineering feat, and I had a lot of fun going through the locks in the ship.  I never even knew what locks were!  Shanghai is a great and large city.  So much more modern than Beijing, and huge.  Unfortunately, my bad foot was flaring up by then and I still wasn't feeling great so I didn't see nearly what I would've like to explore there.

Well, that's it for my first morning back in the US.  Stay tuned for trip journal and picture posts.