Ho Myung San Hiking

So I have been so lucky and have a great friend here in South Korea and she takes me to all these new, beautiful places.  Today we were going on a hike to a lake at Ho Myung San (San = mountain) but first stopped at her friends place.  Her friends place is a nice little thing on the river and they have boats and water toys you can pay to use.  It was beautiful scenery and such a nice day as well.

 The boats.  Old but work well!

 Loving to lay in the sun!

 Our free boat ride that usually costs 70,000 won to ride but we got it for free that day!  Felt so good to be on a boat again and close to the water.  We have planned a day on the river again where we can do some of the sports, BBQ and have fun! 

 So the place we will be using is the one on the far right with the long room with a green roof!

Now onto the hike to the lake at Ho Myung San.  It was a road the whole way up but being the "athletic" people we are we walked the whole way up.  It was pretty much a straight up hill for an hour.  Beautiful scenery the whole way up though! 

Korean wildlife; chipmunks!

So I am not sure why but this is a solar paneled turtle.  They are doing some energy thing with this man made lake but we were not able to find out because the museum was closed.

Justine being careful to not get to much sun!!

Once at the top you are able to walk around the whole lake.  It was probably about 2 miles around.

Two huge swans in the middle of the lake but from here they look like two regular ones.

So we found this tree that fell down and made a really cool photo op but it was not the safest place to go either.  So being the person I am I wanted to climb out on the tree and get a pic.  So I didn't make it as far as I would have liked but this was probably the farthest I could go and be sort of safe.  Photo turned out pretty good!

Justine did get this really cool photo though!

Cool caterpillar.  Cute and hairy!

There were so may pensions you could stay at up in these mountains.  Some were very cute and I would like to stay in sometime.

Yeah, we finished!!

On the way to our hike Rachel pointed out that one of our students owned a restaurant on the way.  So after our long hike we were hungry and I asked Rachel if we could go to Cathy's moms restaurant.  So the restaurant is a Wong Donkus (spelling?) which is king donkus and so yummy.  This is a picture of Cathy and her family: Mom, Dad, sister Melissa, Cathy, Justine and me!  

Cathy and me.  She was so happy we were there!!

Long, tiring day but so worth it.  I now live by "If it is hard to get to it, is worth getting there!"  

Thank you Rachel for the awesome day!!