A Father/Daughter Trip - Ready for Departure

When my daughters/son were in elementary school, we participated in what was then known as the YMCA Indian Princess (daughters) and YMCA Indian Guides (son) programs that were wonderful father/child programs involving monthly meetings to build/assemble various craft projects and regular campouts with similarly situated dads/kids. Since that time the program has gotten more politically correct and removed the "Indian" connection -- and is now called the YMCA Guide Program. Many wonderful memories/experiences were created during those times with each child under the mantra of "Friends Always." I will forever hold those shared moments with each of my children as special times of adventure and fun! Fast forward to today -- when on Wednesday I depart for Beijing on what was initiated as a solo adventure -- but which has become an opportunity to have an adult version of the special father/daughters experiences.

I have already relayed how my oldest daughter Debi (now age 30) surprised me with her interest/commitment in joining this trip to China. As we developed travel plans, my younger daughter Staci (age 24 this month) was able to arrange her schedule to also come to Beijing (some 1300 miles from Shenzhen) to join Debi and me for our visit there and our planned 24 hour train trip to Shenzhen.

I feel incredibly blessed to have this opportunity to have a very unique, trip of a lifetime, "friends always" father/daughters experience in this newest adventure to China. Debi and I are set to depart Wednesday, April 7 and Staci will meet us at the Beijing airport.

In our preparations for the trip, Debi came across a public library offering of a two-DVD set (4 hours) entitled "The People's Republic of Capitalism" narrated by Ted Koppel and produced in 2008 on the Discovery Channel. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand more about today's China. For those of you that may be Netflix subscribers, you can find it here. Much of it confirmed what Debbie and I learned during our Nov/Dec 2009 trip to China -- but there was plenty that was new (did you know that "Buick" cars are the most popular/prestigious cars in China?) Similarly, we ran across a 6 part BBC series called "Wild China" that provides some wonderful background on the culture/wildlife in China. It too is available through Netflix here.

In addition, I FINALLY got around to organizing and selecting a representative sampling of photos from our Nov/Dec 2009 trip to China. Those photos are here. In preparing the photos for uploading, I separately arranged all the photos I took of some the food we ate. Those photos are here.

I am very excited to know that departure is just days away!