I Feel About That?

Trying to pick a place to visit outside the city with the family this weekend.  I found one that wasn’t far from where we live and looked pretty enough in the photos you’d seen on line.  But we’ve made many such trips over the years.  I threw the name into my gmail and sure enough I found a blog post from two years ago that suggested we’d already visited Yunmeng Shan.  I chose it then for just the same reasons I’m considering it today.  OK. I’ve got another one.  It’s twenty minutes further in a different direction.  It also looks lovely. There are photos with fall colors.  But I’m vaguely suspicious that I may have visited the place before as well.  Is that the one with the waterfall?

No good.  I’ve found the Chinese characters for Wuling Shan and it is a three-and-a-half-hour drive from here, not ninety minutes.  Damn.  Now I’m certain I’ve never been there.  That won’t be happening with this gaggle of girls tomorrow morning.  Keep searching.  Keep it very, very positive.  If they hear me groaning it will all just as soon be canceled. 

Got a place now called Jingdong.  Not the online shopping platform Jindong, re-enter, Jingdong.  It’s an hour from here, straight out east.  Not bad.  Within reason.  And there appears to be a sky-glass bridge that lets you walk around the peaks.  How do I feel about that?  I’d rather just walk in the woods.  I suspect the tech will mean it will draw more people.  But perhaps it will work alright.  The girls might dig it.  They may also claim acrophobia.  There aren’t as many photos of autumn leaves at this place. 

It’s out past the town of Ping Gu to the east of here.  I remember a cab driver who bragged about the peaches out in Pinggu during an early spring ride.  He’d done such a good job I remember coming home and suggesting we all head out to a Pinggu orchard later in the spring to pick some.  My wife didn’t think there was much to the idea of going and picking peaches in Pinggu.  Maybe we’ll have lunch there tomorrow en route to Jingdong Shan.  I imagine the power-brokers of Pinggu toasting one another around a lazy suzan, considering plans for a new glass skyway on the outskirts of town.  Was there a Pinggu Robert Moses who insisted that Pinggu had to move beyond peaches?

I shouldn’t be snarky.  There is also a Liao (927-1125 AD) Temple nearby.   Try finding one of those in the Hudson Valley.  Yeah.  And there is also a “Japanese Resistance Hall” commemorating where local people created "armaments", (one assumes they were crude)  to be used against the imperial invaders, which apparently accommodates up to three-hundred-and-fifty people for banquets.  I’ve told everyone to get to bed early.  I see the older photos of fall trips outside of Beijing from years gone by, when the girls were eight or ten or thirteen.   Let’s all go do another one then, while we can.

Saturday, 10/20/18