I never quite know what to do when I see No Cycling signs while riding bike trails. There must be something that I'm missing here...
Check out the cool bird chilling on the bridge out there.
Beautiful, right?
But so long...
And after you've been cycling for hours, hours, and hours...it feels like you've really accomplished something. Surely by now you're almost there! Right?
...Right?
Wrong.
99k to go.
This should look familiar, though.
Not much better than last year...
Nothing like a little overgrown brush to make you feel like you're really out there in the wilderness.
At least there's a helicopter!
And a town!
I wondered a lot if this was the same helicopter I saw last year in a clearing. It seemed to be a different color, though.
Either way, I just kept on.
Getting windy!
Hooray! I've gone over 50 kilometers since the start of the bike path! Which means I've really gone closer to 60, because it takes almost an hour just to reach the start from my apartment.
But still no end in sight...
At least there are plenty of opportunities to take photos to be used in puzzles!
It was afternoon by then and I was getting super tired. This is really where the monotony kicks in and you wish you had a cycling friend. This guy and I passed each other over and over again for a long time before he finally said to me, in Korean, "Cycling alone is a little boring, huh?"
So then we rode together for a little bit. He was ready to ride farther, but I was way too beat and wanted just to rest a while once we hit Buyeo. Getting down into the city's not the most inuitive thing to do, so he showed me how to get in and took me to a touristy spot that had a coffee shop and some nice parks. It seemed a shame to part ways now that I had finally found someone to ride with, but I ended up just hanging out in Buyeo all afternoon, so it was for the best.
In the coffee shop I was so exhausted that I just kept buying more silly little things to eat that weren't really helping me recover much. But I just didn't feel like moving and wanted to just sit there in the air conditioning for hours.
Finally I made myself get up and get ready to go again. In the bathroom the hand dryer had this funny little sign scrawled next to it:
In English, it means:
Hands - yes
Feet - no
Mouth - ?
And that's how I got to Buyeo for an afternoon of sightseeing, which I'll have to detail in a later post. But in the meantime, here's another map. Just follow the river north.
