Day 219: Three Mile Island

The three of us woke up today and were greeted with clear blue sunny skies! Hooray! The last couple weeks have been kinda rainy (unusual for September in Korea) so a warm sunny day on the weekend is a reason to celebrate. We made plans to go out for a little day trip to take advantage of the beautiful weather and escape from the city for a bit (it's been a while since I've left Seoul, like three weeks!)

We decided to go and have a bbq on Yeongheungdo Island, which is located off the coast near Incheon. Unlike Dokchokdo where I've been before camping, this island is accessible by bridge. We stopped into a Carrefour grocery store to pick up supplies for lunch, and then drove on over to the island. There was more traffic than expected on the freeways heading out of Seoul and so it took just over two hours to get there. And we didn't even get lost! Wow!

The island turned out to be...a little less than what was expected. According to the internet sites we looked up, this island is supposed to be really pretty with some great beaches. Well the beaches turned out to be nothing more than small gravely sand patches fronted by enormous MUD FLATS that stretch on forever. The Yellow Sea is really shallow so when the tide goes out, it goes WAY OUT. It's all mucky and smelly and rather gross (yet still crowded with Koreans.)

On top of that, there is a massive power generating station on this island, so there's rows and rows of gigantic high-tension power wires all over the island, funnelling millions of gigawatts or whatever to keep the mainland power grid aflowin'. We decided to leave the Icky Mud Beach and find a better, quieter, hopefully less muddy place for our picnic. We drove around to the other side of the island and found a beach that was a bit bigger and almost empty. It still had 18 miles of mud flasts fronting it, but hey at least we had it to ourselves. And we had a really beautiful view of the open sea and small islands dotting the horizon. Oh wait, no, we couldn't really see that cause of the GIANT POWER LINES stretching across the bay blocking our view. Wow, having a picnic here is like having a picnic on Three Mile Island!

At this point we realized that there was no escape from the mud or power lines so we just had a laugh about it and decided to camp out anyways. We set up our grill and had a yummy bbq lunch. After that we basked in the sun/radiation from the power lines and then played some frisbee. Michael brought his digicam and so he got some great shots of the lovely scenery. I'll have to put 'em up online later cause they're pretty funny in a bleak and dismal way, actually!

In late afternoon we packed our stuff back up and headed on home to Seoul. We took a different route home, driving along the longest causeway that I have ever seen in my entire life. It literally closed off an entire bay that was several kilometres wide, and it took like half an hour or more to drive across this thing! (granted slow traffic played a part in that too.) The traffic back to Seoul was a bitch and it took us three hours to get home.

We headed straight to New Delhi restaurant in Itaewon cause it was the place for Maeve's birthday dinner. This place serves up some really delicious Indian food in their buffet and is one of my favourite restaurants in Korea. YUM! The birthday dinner was small and casual but nice and relaxing. After dinner it was kinda late so I had to head on home to Ilsan. It was a pretty mellow weekend, in all, but I'll more than make up for it next weekend when I fly off to HONG KONG!!! YEEHAW!!!