distance 58 km, ride time 4:15
Today was another slog on busy highways. It seemed like we would never escape the city. At one point we were moving along so slowly we were being passed by trees! OK, so maybe the trees were on the back of flat bed trucks, but still we were passed by several of them today.
Since there was no way we were going to make it to Chungju-si tonight, we decided to try and catch a bus from Yangji (the intersection of highways 42 and 17). A nice man, Stephen, found us and tried to help us find the right bus, but we would need to take 2 buses to get to Chungju-si. He talked to the driver on the first bus, who said our bikes were too big (it did not have luggage space). The driver did say that after 2 more busses, there would be one that could take us. We looked at our map again, and thought that it would make more sense to go to Icheon (not to be confused with Incheon where we started), and try to catch a bus south from there. So we hopped back on the bikes and continued along to Icheon (another 22 km).
Icheon being a much bigger city, was listed in the Lonely Planet. With the help of a lot of pure luck (the LP did not have a map, and our map showed Icheon in a huge area and did not indicate which part was downtown), we found the Now, It’s the Moon Time Hotel – yes, another Love Motel. We noticed that the hotel had neat little sandwich boards that went in front of each car to cover the license plates. Unfortunately they had nothing available to disguise our bicycles. The room we chose was not quite as well equipped as last night’s, with only a small CRT television, and much less floor space. Quite adequate for our needs though.
