Day 1,2,3- Seoul

We made it!  We had a 14 hour flight made a little more difficult by the United Airlines system outage (none of their systems worked for a few hours, the airport was packed with folks waiting to get on their flights, to United's credit they did a great job of getting folks organized and on their Uway when the system rebooted).  After a fairly sleepless overnight flight in which we caught up on the movies that we never needed to see in the first place (we are talking to you Longest Ride) we were in Korea!

!Bruce putting his bike together in the Seoul airport.

It felt amazing to stretch our legs, and already I am super impressed by the bike trail system in and around Seoul and the sheer number of people cycling here.  We got a little lost, and when we went to consult the map....uh, we accidentally grabbed the Korean language version.  Shoot.  Eventually our 13 mile bike ride turned into a 30 mile bike epic as we attempted to navigate through directions given to us by all the gracious but Korean speaking folks we stopped.  

Fields ringed by skyscrapers on the bike path.

And eventually, as it was getting past the time to check into our guesthouse, we found a subway stop, hauled our bikes and bags on the train, and got to the guest house at midnight.

Ahhhh, air conditioning! Our guesthouse, The Kimchee guesthouse (www.kimcheeguesthouse.com) in the Dongdaemun district feels a bit like paradise right now, air-conditioning, a nice firm bed, lots of food nearby, and our own bathroom.  So much so that we are staying an extra night to get ourselves sorted out for cycling on Sunday the 12th.

Yesterday, after a well-slept night for Bruce and a partially sleepless night for me (as per normal) we set out early for some food and a little sightseeing.  We happened into this cart and with a little help from a lovely passer-by we ordered some  delicious noodles.  Mmmm. After filling our bellies we wandered to visit my first Unesco world heritage site the Gyeongbogunk Palace. 

   

It was absolutely amazing. the architecture, hand-crafted wood pieces and paintings were stunning.  After wandering for awhile there, we walked through the Bukchon Hanok village (full of traditional houses) ended up touring through one of the houses where a historic, important Korean painter lived. Hot, a bit tired and hungry we made our way to the Namdaemun Market for some bimbibap, a traditional Korean dish of noodles, sauce, and egg served cold.  I'm getting a kick out of how every lady at a food stall gives me a fork when they see me trying to use chopsticks.  Not Bruce, he's apparently a master. :)

After lots of great site seeing we went to bed before 7pm...maybe we hadn't avoided the jet lag after all?!  Today we are going to work on sorting out our bikes.  It has been in  the high 90s here with humidity, tomorrow it will drop into the 80s with 100% chance of rain!  I'm actually looking forward to the cooler weather and starting our bike journey in earnest!

Our bikes!

So, this trip didn't start out as a bike trip.  We weren't quite sure what we were planning on doing, we new we wanted to go to Asia, we more or less decided backpacking would be the easiest way to get around, we hope to volunteer in Nepal for awhile.  But as I started to really plan the trip and started plannign the route (based on a highly scientific process of comparing ticket prices and weather patterns) I started  to realize that I spending a lot of time looking for places that we could cycle and rent bikes. Finally, we just decided that we really wanted to have bikes.  Initlially, our normal touring set-ups.  Then as we started looking into transporting bikes to and fro, we started to consider folding bikes.  We tried some used ones and the few new folding bikes that we could find in Portland, but we really wanted something that was going to be a bit burlier with more gears.  Bruce contacted Tern about some choices there, and after lots of back and forth about exactly what we wanted (do we need a generator hub? Would nine gears be suffcient? How much do we really want to spend?)  We decided to dget the Cadillac of the folding bike world (in our price range!) the Tern S27.  THis bike has all the bells adn whistles.   It has a highly adjustable handlebar that is super comfy. It has a generator hub for both front and rear lights and we added a USB port for charging things. Its got big fatty nice tires that will roll over everything (the are actually Schwalbe Big Apples if you are keeping track of such things).  It has both a front and rear rack that fit our normal Ortlieb bags with a little adjusting.  It's got disc brakes that stop on a dime.  It's also got a lot of cool little engineering pieces that make me think that Tern really ddid thiei homework.  The pump that lives in the seat, the stays on the rack to help keep your bags in place, etc.

So what is the price of all this awesomeness?  This little guy is ..well... not that little.  Its pretty heavy.  Moreso than our normal touring bikes but we decided that the extra bells and whistles that came with this bike are worth the trade off.  We could have gotten a more road-type folding bikee, but I already love how solid this bike feels and how it just has everything already there.  And we are not in a hurry, so we just going to enjoy the (slightly slower) ride...

One big sleep left...

Sorry about not keeping y'all up-to-date but Chiara and I have spent the last 2 days running around trying to finalize all those little, nagging unfinished bits that always consume the last few days before a big trip.  Some of said problems get resolved, some do not, but in the end of the day you board that great flying machine and it all gets left behind. 

So here we are...t-7 hours from departure, bags packed, good byes uttered.  Those little things begin to slowly melt into the ether as we realize what has been an impossible dream for so long. Tomorrow we leave for South Korea, the first leg of our journey. All the good energy and love from friends, family and even those we may have just met is propelling us forward on a wave of happiness. Thank you, thank you a thousand times to everyone. We hope you enjoy reading about our journey even a millionth as much as we will enjoy living it. 

Thanks to Clever Cycles for setting up our Tern bikes!