My mother and I are standing inside the women’s restroom at San Francisco International Airport. Mom is garbed in one of her many lightweight, color-coordinated, wrinkle-free traveling outfits. I’m in jeans, and I’m watching her pour cool bottled water into two plastic juice glasses brought from home. When the glasses are full, she hands them to me and drops a round, white Airborne tablet into each one. The water fizzes and turns slightly orange. Mom explains that Airborne is a potent combination of vitamins that helps fend off germs on long flights. Mom worked in a hospital emergency room for thirty-five years. She knows her germs.

“I never go anywhere without my Airborne,” she says.

This is the third time she’s said this in the last ten minutes.
 
Mom are I are inoculating ourselves inside the ladies room because in thirty minutes, barring any unexpected delays, we will embark on a 15-hour flight from San Francisco to Beijing for a three-week, no-spouses, no-siblings tour of China. Just my mother. And me.

Actually, the trip was Mom’s idea. She wants to cruise down the Yangtze River before the massive Three Gorges dam project completely swallows the river, its soaring black rock canyons, and the historic cities along its banks. She’s been to China before -- she’s been everywhere before -- but wasn’t able to see the river, and when she mentioned to my father that she’d like to return, his response was straight out of the “I’m Over 70 and Don’t Have To Do Anything I Don’t Want To” handbook.

“Have fun,” he said.

Thinking the trip might be a way for Mom and me to connect on a tender and more intimate level, the level that self-help books say mothers and daughters are supposed to connect on, I told her I would go.

Looking back, I believe I may have made this offer after several glasses of Chardonnay.

* * *

Our first day in China find us traveling in a small white bus: Mom, me and 12 other tourists who’ve signed up for Uniworld’s “Splendors of China” Tour. We’re weaving through Beijing’s crowded streets to Tiananmen Square, the first stop on a day-long tour of the city.

Our guide, Leslie, a tall slim young man with crumbs at the corners of his lips, is reciting a litany of facts about Beijing. There are eleven million people here, he says, and roughly eight million bicycles. There are 108 embassies. And since China began to open its doors to world markets five years ago, fifty McDonalds restaurants have opened in the city, and there are plans to add fifty more in the next twelve months.
 
As he says this, our bus passes a bright new red-and-yellow McDonalds on a heavily trafficked street. “Look!” Mom says, pointing at the restaurant with a glossy red fingernail. “Isn’t that amazing!” Her thin eyebrows are raised high above her gold-rim glasses as if she is truly dazzled by this sight. As if seeing McDonalds in the middle of a busy city is as wondrous as a finding a rare mongoose in Madagascar. 
 
We continue our tour and Mom finds many, many things to be amazed about. The price of postcards is amazing. The size of Tiananmen Square is amazing. The number of cars in Beijing since her last visit is amazing. It starts to rain and that, amazingly enough, is also amazing to my mother. Never before in the history of recorded travel has the commonplace been give so much credit.

* * *

Day four and we're at the Great Wall of China, which stretches some 4,000 miles over rolling green hills across the northern end of the country. Our tour group travels to a portion of the wall just 40 miles outside of Beijing. As we pull into the parking lot, I’m startled to realize that the wall, at least in this section, is not the undulating peaceful wall depicted in travel brochures. Here, the wall climbs steeply, stair after stair, rising 1,000 maybe 1,500 feet before the steps end and the smooth concrete pathway begins. Although it’s early morning, already the lower part of the wall is packed pillar to brick with tourists in bright sun hats. 
 
Mom and I step off the bus and start to make our way toward the wall. She walks a few steps behind me because she’s 73 and her pace has slowed, and because I’m 40 and inconsiderate. 
 
I walk up the first small set of stairs and turn to wait for her. The sun is warm, and after the gray, noisy congestion of Beijing, the peaceful green countryside is a welcome relief. I look down at my mother as she starts up the stairs. She’s got short pale red hair that she keeps tightly permed because she doesn’t like to fuss with it anymore. Her skin, which she’s cared for with religious devotion for decades, is smooth for her age. But it’s whiter than it used to be. And as I watch her making her way toward me, I realize it’s not just her pace that’s slowed. Her overall demeanor is more cautious. When did this happen?
  
Mom starts up the steps. A small black video camera is slung around her neck and she cradles it close to her chest with one arm. She rises one step and starts to approach the second when the tip of her tennis shoe catches the step’s rough edge and she falls, swiftly and without warning, to the ground. Her video camera hits the pavement with a metallic thud. 
 
Startled, I rush back down the stairs. 
 
“Are you okay?” I ask.
 
“I can’t believe I fell,” she says. “One minute I’m standing, the next minute I’m on the ground.” She chuckles, but I sense the laugh may be for my benefit. I help her up and she sits unsteadily on a low concrete rise nearby. She wipes dust from the knees of her royal blue pants. Her face is flushed, but whether it’s from the heat or embarrassment or worry it’s hard to tell.
 
“Did you hurt yourself?” 
 
“Oh, no. I’m fine. Just clumsy. I don’t do well with stairs anymore. You go ahead, honey.”
 
I glance sideways at the wall and feel myself stretched in painfully opposite directions like some crazy cartoon cat: my aging mother tugging on one arm, a selfish little girl yanking on the other. I want to climb the wall, but…
 
Another member of our tour group saw Mom fall and she comes over to tell me she will sit with her. 
 
“Really?” I ask.
 
“Of course,” she says. She’s about the same age as my mother.
 
“Neither of you needs to sit with me,” Mom says. “I’m perfectly fine waiting here by myself. You go ahead.”
 
And so I begin to climb the hard stone steps. One by one, up and up and up, past bundles of German and Japanese and Spanish tourists. I feel tense, like I shouldn’t be here, but the views of the jagged green hillside are so stupendous I begin to relax. I stop, look at the hazy horizon and thank God for the ability to travel to such awe-inspiring places. I climb some more and stop again, this time because I realize I’ve just spoken to God, something that’s completely out of character for me. But I’m on the Great Wall and, well, if you can’t speak to God here where can you? And so I continue… to climb… to inhale the experience… and to thank God for the life I’ve been given. But in between these tentative entry-level prayers of thanks, I’m also begging begging God to keep my mother healthy and promising promising that if he does I will be kinder and more forgiving during those times when my mother repeats herself, makes inane comments, or otherwise dares to be herself as opposed to my thoroughly unattainable Hollywood ideal of what a mother should be. 
 
Ninety minutes later I rejoin my mother and the other travelers on the bus. I sit down next to Mom, who seems to have recovered just fine, and she begins telling everyone about her fall. “Just call me Clumsy Betty,” she says. Someone in bus chuckles at the Clumsy Betty comment and this serves to encourage her. She repeats the story, dialing up the volume and adding little embellishments for each new person to arrive.  
 
“And then Clumsy Betty fell on the second step…” 

“So then Clumsy Betty waited for her daughter at the bottom…”
 
“That’s just me, Clumsy Betty.” 
 
I’m not sure, but I think God is testing me...

(The full essay will be published in March in the 2007 edition of Best Women's Travel Writing, published by Traveler's Tales.)