May 13, 2022
Working for the weekend: 연곡[Yeongok]-오호리[Oho-ri]
A couple of neighbors set their tents up well after dark last night. We figured that these folks finished work and drove to the campground for a long weekend. It inspired me to make that the theme of today's journal entry! As a class-conscious person, I'm always curious to know the various ways Koreans earn a living and spend their leisure time. Apparently one thing people do is to read books in these little shelters. Pretty neat, huh?
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We got off to a late start -- almost 9am -- because we wanted to perform some maintenance on our bikes. I cut off the old tape from my saddle, replacing it with just the ugly green stuff. It held up all day. Yay! We also oiled and cleaned up our drive trains. We should be set for the rest of the trip.
Then it was off to the races to bike next to more enchanting beaches. I'd been keeping a close eye on the weather reports. The days of predicted rain dropped from 3 to 2, then to 1 (today). Then it got pushed back from morning to afternoon. I was hoping we'd get lucky enough this Friday the 13th (ha ha) to avoid rain all together. The darkening clouds reminded me that this was unlikely.
First stamp of the day! I bagged 4 of them.
We passed through a few small surfing beaches populated by kids in their 20s, along with a few older counter-culture types. It made me the tiniest bit nostalgic for the Southern California beaches I haunted in my youth. It also made me wonder what circumstances brought them here. Were they just scraping by? Did they have trust funds? Were they not surf bums at all, but just playing the role for a few days before returning to Seoul or wherever their real life takes place?
The variety of terrain and surroundings continued today, although it was noticeably less hilly than even yesterday.
As I was coasting down a hill, my mind wandered. I didn't see two plastic bollards in front of me. My left front pannier took the impact and broke off. By some miracle, I reacted quickly and was able to keep my balance. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. The pannier lay a few meters behind me. Sunyoung picked it up and brought it to me. I examined it. It looked okay. I reattached it and discovered that one of the latches had broken off. Honestly, that point of structural weakness probably saved me from a terrible fall. It'll cost a few bucks to replace, but that's a small price to pay for being able to continue our journey in one piece.
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The weather favored us for lunch today. We ate rice with a packet of dried radish side dish and tofu. We finished off our first fuel canister too. This new camp stove is less versatile, but it sure is convenient. I'm not sure we're really saving any money by eating this way. It does give us a little more freedom by letting us eat what we want, when we want.
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Two o'clock rolled around and we were still dry. Time for another stamp!
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The rain finally came, mostly as drizzle, but it was heavy enough to make us cautious coming down hills and riding over metal grates and such. It also made my phone difficult to use for navigation and limited our vision. Just in time for us to enter the big city of 속초!
We followed the path to a spot just below a bridge we were supposed to cross. There was an elevator up to the bridge deck that we can only assume is part of the official path! We've seen them on a lot of bridges, agreeing that it's a pretty cool part of the public infrastructure here. Now we were finally able to take advantage of one!
The first bridge led to another. Luckily there were no pedrestrians to tangle (tango?) with.
The rain finally let up at around 4:00, which was great, but we both found ourselves tired and cranky. We started to talk about ending this day as soon as possible.
The final straw was this park at which they dared us to walk our bikes down one long set of stairs and up another. Runnels were installed, but there isn't enough clearance for our panniers. Rather than carry half our panniers on our shoulders, we decided to route around it. We spent only a few hundred meters on a highway before we were past all that mess.
We could tell we were getting closer to the border as oddities like this started to appear:
As we approached the campground we had chosen for this evening's destination, a bunch of other campgrounds cropped up. The first one we tried was all concrete with plastic decks and no view. So what, we were tired. They wanted 50,000₩ for a standard site! And the showers weren't even free! We huffed at the owner's audacity and continued to the next campground. 40,000₩! What's going on here? A ways further, a third campground appeared. It was really nice and it looked like it might have been run by some government entity. We crossed our fingers. 50,000₩! We could get a hotel for that! And so we did!
We never made it to our destination campground. Instead we found this lovely little place off the beaten path that has a balcony we can cook on and dry our laundry. They even gave us a nice indoor spot to store our bikes.
I think that we're being a little overly-cautious about all those "no camping" signs. We started to see more people camping on the beach. It's hard to tell, because it's fine to set up a tent during the day, and it's a popular thing to do here. Anyway, we speculate that these high prices at commerical campgrounds are due to the fact that it's a weekend. To that end, we're unlikely to camp tomorrow, either.
Another piece of bad news: it seems that we can't ride all the way to the Unification Observatory after all! Apparently they only allow cars, for "security reasons". What a backwards policy! Anyway,we'll see how far they let us go before asking us to turn around. It should be fun.
Today's ride: 73 km (45 miles)
Total: 996 km (619 miles)
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