Road Trip!

After about 6 months of saying, "We should rent a car and go on a road trip," we finally did it. We looked through the South Korea guide book, picked some cities and plotted a route. We had heard that Gwangju was a cool city, so we started there. It was a little too far to drive to on Friday night after work, so we looked for somewhere in the middle. Jinju looked like the biggest city between Ulsan and Gwangju, and it had a fortress, so we decided we'd stay there Friday night and go the rest of the way to Gwangju on Saturday. Then we decided we wanted to go all the way across Korea and see the west coast, so we added Mokpo to the list of cities we were going to visit.

Andrew spent most of Friday at school trying to turn a Korean atlas into something that would make sense to Judy, the navigator. Luckily, while picking up the rental, Andrew managed to get them to throw in a navigation system, so we didn't even need the Korean atlas. It was all still in Korean, but way less stressful than had we not had it.

The Kumho rental employees checking the car and setting the GPS.

Ahhh! Driving in Korea!

A life saver

That's right, it had a tape deck!

2007 Hyundai Avante

Truly, a sweet ride

Randomly, Andrew's principal made this for him the week we rented the car. Almost all cars in Korea have these, so that people can just call you when they need you to move your car, which allows Koreans to park anywhere.

They gave keys to a crazy man!

The road trip begins

Nervous

This was the first of nearly a hundred tunnels we passed through. The Korean freeway system is covered with them, who knew?

A Korean truck stop! A magical wonderland in itself...

This was at the entrance to the restroom.
No clue what it did.

The one on the right tells you your fortune, and the bright one on the left is a game. It is similar to the claw game, but instead of grabbing from above, you have to poke the items from in front so they fall behind.

Just some of the sweet prizes up for grabs.