Spring Festival Travel Plans

Our planned route for Spring Festival was as follows (if you want to know where these provinces are, refer to the map I posted earlier):

Cities (provincial capitals in bold, reasons for going to non-provincial capital cities in brackets): Yinchuan --> Yan'an (city where Mao Zedong settled after the Long March and the centre of the Revolution) --> Baotou (Genghis Khan's Mausoleum) --> Hohhot --> Datong (Yungang Grottoes (cave carvings)) --> Taiyuan --> Pingyao (preserved Qing and Ming Dynasty city) --> Shijiazhuang --> Beijing --> Tianjin --> Harbin --> Changchun --> Jilin City (forest of petrified trees, a natural phenomenen) --> Shenyang --> Xingcheng (preserved Ming village) --> Dalian (rapidly developing coastal town, very famous in China for its laidback atmosphere) --> Yantai (another coastal town, with strong Korean influences, highly recommended by our friends) --> Jinan --> Qufu (birthplace of Confucius) --> Zhengzhou --> Luoyang (Longmen Cave Carvings) --> Xi'an --> Lanzhou --> Xining --> Urumqi (best city in the world, like.)

Provinces: Ningxia Hui --> Shaanxi --> Inner Mongolia --> Shanxi --> Hebei --> Beijing Municipality --> Tianjin Municipality --> Heilongjiang --> Jilin --> Liaoning --> Shandong --> Henan --> Shanxi again --> Gansu --> Qinghai --> URUMQI!

We didn't actually manage to stick to this plan. We were originally worried that we wouldn't have enough time to be back for when classes start, and figured we may have to skive the first week. Plus they told us that we'd be starting back late February now, not early March as they'd originally said. Anyway, the opposite happened! We thundered through the cities, and had to add more to the itinerary step-by-step as we went. I'll explain as I blog : )