BootsnAll Travel Network



Summer Travels

We took a high speed train from Nanning to Guangzhou on July 22. We spent the night in a bargain hotel ($15 for the night) near the airport and the next morning flew to Beijing, then onto LAX and then an overnight flight to Indianapolis. We enjoyed a week visiting family and friends before heading to Gatlinburg for a few days for our annual reunion with my Coca-Cola friends. We rented a 5 bedroom house in the Smokey Mountains and had a great time relaxing and enjoying the mountains. We also enjoyed a visit with former Edy’s buddy, Norm Downing and his wife Joyce. On the last morning there we had a bear saunter by the back door on the deck. He seemed to be looking for breakfast. After a few more days back in Indiana, we borrowed Mom’s car (thanks Mom!) and headed northwest.

Our first stop on this leg of our trip was just south of Chicago to visit my nephew Drew, his wife Annie and my niece Katie. Drew and Annie graduated from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University a few years ago and are teaching in Portage, Indiana. Katie will graduate from Jacobs next year and also hopes to teach at a public school. They gave us a tour of the school where they teach and we were very impressed by the facilities and equipment they had. The next day we headed for Minneapolis where we visited the Mall of America. It was impressive but not really much bigger than some of the malls we have here in Nanning. We went to see a movie while there and the cost was a bargain at $6 per ticket compared to the cost of seeing movies here in China (average cost of $8 to $10).

Our next stop was Wall, South Dakota near Badlands National Park. We toured the park, did a long hike and drove over to see Mount Rushmore which was quite impressive. We then headed to Billings, Montana where we spent the weekend with Loyd and Lynn Knudsen. Loyd and I taught together here several years ago and I went to their wedding which took place in LiuZhou which is a bit north of Nanning. Lynn is Chinese and has become an American citizen since moving to the states with Loyd 4 years ago. She has really adapted well to life in the states and spends most of her time chasing after their 4 your old son, Ike. She has become a garage sale junkie and my wife really likes garage sales since discovering one by accident last year so we had to hit a couple garage sales while seeing the sites of Billings. Loyd is managing a security company watching over oil and gas drilling locations which keeps him out of town most of the time.

After leaving Billings we headed to Yellowstone National Park. Shortly after entering the park we had to stop to allow a bunch of bison to cross the road. This happened a couple more times during our stay there. We did a late afternoon/ early evening hike after checking in to our hotel and saw the famous sites close to the hotel such as the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and a couple waterfalls. We also got our first glimpse of a bear that evening. The next day we did an 8 mile, 5 hour hike starting near Old Faithful. We saw many geysers and hot springs. We were happy to stand near the hot springs since it was only about 30 degrees F when we started. We got to see Grand Geyser and Old Faithful erupt. The next day we did a couple hikes totaling 6 miles with a large elevation change which really wore me out considering that we were at an elevation of more than 6000 feet. The next day as we were heading out of the park we had to stop to allow a bear to cross the road in front of us. We drove to Laramie, Wyoming to spend the night then on to Denver the next day.

We spent a few days in Denver to recover from our hiking and to allow me to take a day trip to Las Vegas to renew my driver’s license. We left Denver to drive back to Indiana. It was our first time to experience the miles and miles of plains with very little traffic and very few places to stop. We made it back to Indiana in time to spend a few more days with family before heading back to China. Including our trip to Gatlinburg we drove over 5000 miles in about a month’s time. My mother’s car is more than 2 years old and only had 10,000 miles on it before we embarked on our trips. Bonnie shared the driving with me thank goodness and her driving skills continue to improve.

We’re now back in Nanning and classes start this week but my first class isn’t until next week. Here is the link to see pictures from our trip: https://davidsadventure.shutterfly.com/1303



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