July 1 – Day 1 –  Los Angeles – Our son, Ryan, was always fascinated by the Great Wall of China. We talked about it often and promised him that we would take him there one day. When he turned 15, we decided that the time was right, for the trip of a lifetime.

I may not have mentioned it, but three of my wife’s uncles were tour directors. One worked the Orient, one the middle east, and one worked here in America. She always had family going back and forth from one country or another and was well aware of family stories and their travel lore.

She had family living in England and they had migrated there from Europe just a few generations before her birth. Her father was born in London and his parents and he migrated to Canada when he was quite young. His mother was from Glasgow and his father was from Odessa. So, as you can easily see, there was the travel gene in their biology.

My father’s family came from Ireland and England and my mother’s family came from Scotland. My family came to America many generations ago. Some came on the Mayflower and you would recognize their names if I mentioned them, but I will not bore you with that subject here. They surely would not want to be associated with their later family members due to our behavior and circumstances, so I will not defile their names here.

The point of all of this is the fact that I had traveled very little before meeting my wife. She, on the other hand, had been stationed in Italy while in the navy and lived there for a year. She had also traveled to London to visit family and spent a summer there when she was in high school. She had also traveled to Spain and the middle east to some degree for her graduation from high school.

We are still close to her family in London after all these years. This is the short version of our family and travel history of sorts.

Needless to say, we were all excited to be taking this wonderful trip. The flight was a long one, but it was uneventful and almost pleasant.

Go to my friends Facebook page at Ray-Andrea Matthews to see photos of my adventures. It’s public.

Click on the “book” box at this site to read a free chapter from one of my books available on Amazon. You can google me, R. C. Hand and meet me, sort of.