In Feb 2005, we embarked on a road trip from Beijing to my hometown in a small county site in the northeastern part of Sichuan Province. At that time, there were only segmented highways, we had to go a way lower grade of road for most of our journey.
We basically followed G 108 that go through Mt. Qinling to the south of Xi'an of Shaanxi Province. The section from Xi'an to Hanzhong, which is less than 400 km, took us more than 8 hours because of frequent accidents on the highway in the mountains. The shortest wait was about 40 minutes and the longest one was over 2 hours, and we had 4 of such accidents on the way down to the south and one major one on the way back to Beijing.
On the first day, we started from Beijing and ended in Xi'an when it was dark already and the total drive was about 1,200 km.
The second day was the hardest since we had to climb up Mt. Qinling on the winding and narrow road that was prone to traffic accidents. It was a long day from Xi'an to Mianyang where spent the night. The hotel in Mianyang we stayed was horrible, very dirty and messy, we basically did not take off our clothes for the night. We started very early on the third day and we went directly from Mianyang to Dujiangyan - ancient water conservancy project close to Chengdu. Wonderful time there!
From Dujiangyan, we drove all the way to my hometown of Quxian County where we celebrated spring festival with my family, again, wonderful and unforgettable time. On the way back to Beijing, we chose a different route to go over Mt. Qinling, i.e. via Baoji. The road was in better condition, but still we met one major accident that wasted us about 2 hours.
We went to Terracotta Warriors close to Xi'an and Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang. Of course, we spent one night at Sanmenxia of Henan Province. This was the first long haul for us, but it went pretty well and we enjoyed it.