Well, this is it. The last post of the trip! Officially we've been off the road for a week now. It's been a very busy week, moving into an apartment, applying for the Guinness record, and catching up with friends who we hadn't seen in nearly half a year. The last few days into Beijing were by no means easy though. We hit some of the coldest weather since Tibet, strongest winds since Urumqi, and boatloads of trucks.

Heading back north now through central/eastern China before heading over to the coast. Pollution in eastern China during the winter can be especially harsh, giving us the wrong kind of fuzzy feeling inside when thinking about heading back to Beijing. A nice reunion with a motorcycle club in Shandong helps to take our mind off of it though!

Busy couple of days but not much distance covered. We do two fund raising presentations, one in Hangzhou and one in Shanghai with a little bit of a break for Thanksgiving festivities in between. This, at least for us mentally, marks the beginning of the last leg of the trip for us.

We manage to cover over 1,200km in three days as we make the choice to take the highway to get back down south to the coast where we have plans to visit Macau, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen.

3 days off at the beach in Sanya but we are kept busy as we participate in fundraising events with the hotel and Free Lunch for Children. We also meet with some of the local press talking about our trip and our charitable efforts. All in all, managed to raise nearly RMB40,000 to go towards school lunches in rural China!

In three days we go through 3 different provinces, experience drastic changes in climate, and our luck with our broken luggage rack both falls short and holds up.

Busy days out of Chongqing- Expressways, farmland, planned and unplanned Giant Buddha visits, all topped up with some spectacular remote canyon driving through southern Sichuan.

Not quite done with the dirt roads and construction but a definite improvement over the past few days! Only two more days before getting to Chengdu but before that we stay overnight with a Tibetan family.

We met our competition for the world record today and it wasn't so bad as it may have at first seemed. Some creepy desert roads as we make our way to the most westerly point of our trip in Kashgar.

Turning up the heat as we move into Xinjiang province. We visit (one of?) the lowest points on earth at the Turpan Depression and get stranded at the abandoned tourist center in the middle of a massive sandstorm.