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My baby is pregnant and I hiked 10k on the Great Wall.

On Monday when I returned from China I got a call from my beautiful daughter who said that she figured out that the reason she has been feeling so crappy for the last couple weeks is that she is pregnant. I'm going to be a grandma! Fantastic!
Now I wish I had bought the adorable mandarin hats that they were selling for children at the Summer Palace. Ah well, there's plenty of time to find cute baby stuff. I had been jealous of people who were doting on their grandchildren. Now I can be one of them.

Meanwhile during our weekend in Beijing we arranged with a taxi driver to take us to one of the access points to the Great Wall near Beijing called JinShanLing (it's about a 2 hour drive into the countryside). The driver left us there and then drove to the nearby access point at Simitai. We walked along the Wall for 10 kilometers from JinShanLing to Simitai and then found our taxi driver and returned to Beijing. What a neat thing to do. It took us about 3-1/2 hours to hike the 10 kilometers along the Wall. It is a great experience to be hiking on this impressive structure. As you hike you can see it wending its way along the mountain ridges in both directions. On parts of the hike the Wall was fairly intact and in other places it had crumbled away so we had to scramble using our hands. It was just great! The hike itself was not that difficult. There are lots of steps and hills because it is following the contours of the mountain ridges. It was an exhilarating experience. I never thought I would be able to hike on the Great Wall of China.