I didn’t walk up all 7000, or however many, stairs there are going up Taishan. It took me so long to get to the halfway point that we decided to take the cable way to the top. But I didn’t feel deprived: there were plenty more stairs once you got to the top!

I have to commend my son’s excellent “parenting” skills: he let me figure out for myself that the cable way was the path of wisdom. Only later did he confess that he had been figuring that he could wear my backpack on his front going up the steepest part and was, even at that, trying to figure out how to prevent me from falling. He had been up before and the steepest part was yet to come and much steeper than the stretches that had challenged me.

For Becky of Winchester’s Lines and Squares-Day 19