Almost too much to deal with.

is the name of the business that rented us the place we stayed in over the weekend.

We had a great time with the Tebos. Emily, Lukas and Gabby all played well together so that we didn’t need to parent so hard. His lordship still required some attention though.

We are heading up to Mutianyu after lunch today to stay in a house we have rented that is a few minutes hike from The Wall.

Not an actual fox, much to my children’s disappointment.

On the Tianbei highway this afternoon, a dark green Jeep was driving at 80km/h when a farmer decided to dash from the kerb right into the driver’s path. Some deft deceleration and swerving by the Jeep driver allowed the oblivious farmer to live to be baffled by the modern world another day.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the driver of the Jeep knew how to say “DUMB C&$T” in Chinese allowing all involved to fully play their part.

From now on this is my blog again.

The reason we went to Zhengzhou was for Lydia and Tyler’s wedding.

This is the happy couple:

Prior to the wedding we sight saw. I forget the name of the park we went to, but it was about an hour outside of the city on a bend in the Yellow River.

Emily really loved the stepped pyramid in the middle of the giant park and afterward refused to use “baby steps” whenever possible.

The giant stone heads on the top of the hill were the intended attraction:

However, Emily and Lukas were the centre if attention everywhere we went. We didn’t see any westerners until our last night there and they were very surprised to see fellow English speakers.

Despite Lukas’ grimmace the wedding was enjoyable.

See:

It was out first touristy trip since Lukas was three months old and it has proved to us that we can start travelling again. We’ve been a bit gun shy about long bus, plane and train rides due to restless child syndrome, but it looks like we have headed back out into the light again.

On Tuesday we caught the train south to Zhengzhou (Jung Joe) to go to our friend’s wedding reception. The trip took five hours and when we arrived we quadrupled the amount of westerners in the city. In fact we didn’t even see any westerners at all until our last night when two incredulous Americans came up to ask why we were in Zhengzhou of all places.

*

We caught a bus back to Beijing because it was impossible to get return train tickets and after eleven hours were safely home.

* Sight seeing and fun occurred here and needs documenting.