Busan to Seoul

This Monday was Korean Thanksgiving, so we had Monday and Tuesday off of school. To celebrate, a friend and I flew from Seoul to Busan, a city on the Southern coast of South Korea, and then rode our bikes back up to Seoul. It was a rainy, mountainous 300+ mile journey and we somehow managed to complete it in 3 and a half days. My legs hurt like crazy.

Look how far that is!

I didn't actually manage to take many pictures, because we were booking it pretty much as fast as we could the whole time, but I will post the ones I did manage to take soon.

Here they are:

Jiyoung didn't want to be photgraphed with the field of kimchi pots but too bad. Here we are like 10 miles in. I really wish I had pictures from the spectacle that was us assembling our bikes in the airport but was too busy at the time to think to take any.

Things are so much greener when you aren't in Seoul.

There are so many mountains in Korea. They are really beautiful until you have to ride your bike up them.

Jiyoung at the sweet ship restaurant we were too scared to eat at at the end of day one, because it looked so couply and expensive and because we were disgusting after having ridden all day in the rain.

I made it too!

Seriously who built this? Absurd.

Jiyoung ready for day two!

The mountains were all covered in mystical fog on day two.

More mountains. Ugh.

Day Three: Chuseok breakfast at the 7-11. If only they'd had songpyeon...

This is what rice looks like if you get close to it:

It's just so green!

We spent a lot of time doing this. Thank you Navigator Jiyoung.

We had to cross the continental divide on Day 3. This involved riding uphill at like 10% inclines for 5.5 km. Never doing this again.

But we made it!!!!

I'm tired.

Jiyoung still has plenty of energy apparently.

The last day involved like 190 km of riding. It was intense. But somehow we made it back to Seoul by sunset and I made it home in time to get to Madigans for tacos.

No better way to end a long ride than ramyeon and beer at a riverside convenience store!

Jiyoung's less excited about it than I am I guess.

Anyway, all-in-all a success and I'm really glad I did it and really amazed I survived!