I labeled yesterday as a travel day as we moved from Busan to Gyoengju on a 1 hour? bus trip. Today we were on 8? bus trips, mainly going down and back to the Hahoe Village in Andong. But it is certainly not a travel day as we did not move! We started with a Hotel breakfast:
Next played out the drama of self directed travel. Kim loves to drive, the tourist information office had pointed us to a car rental location yesterday and so we started Monday in hot pursuit. No car rental office, even after a return to the information office! I have not idea what was afoot. My one suggestion of lets go to the other side of town where the expensive hotels are, was really not serious. We moved to plan B and bought a bus ticket to Andong. The bus was scheduled for 11, it was 9:30 so Tom motivated us to ride the local busses over to the ancient observatory and back in the intervening time.
It is nearly impossible to convey to you the interested reader what befell us next. We got to the bus stop. Google and/or Naver (Korean google maps) had given us a bus number. The Bus stop displays the arrival time of the next 2-3 busses (Novel idea for a first world country? Wonder if the US could do it?), Our bus was not on the list. Kim became more agitated about the danger of not getting back in time for the bus. Tom motivated getting on the next bus even thoug h it was the wrong number. We are able to track our progress with the APPS and we were definitely on the right track BUT we blew by the observatory and kept going for a LONG way before we could get off. We walked back, we took another bus, we worried and in fact we actually made it back to the bus station in time for our bus to Andong. Tom thinks of this as a reasonable adventure in local bus riding. Kim, not so much!
