We’re back!
It’s been a whirlwind of a trip, and I made the huge mistake of not bringing my laptop. It made for a completely work-free environment, but it also meant that organizing and editing photos, as well as drafting blogs was a bit difficult. So get ready for the outpouring of content!
Four countries in 24 days
While that seems like a long time, aside from Hong Kong, Beijing and Seoul, we only stayed in each city for about 8-10 hours.
- Hong Kong, China
- Taipei/Keelung, Taiwan
- Nagasaki, Japan
- Busan, South Korea
- Jeju Island, South Korea
- Incheon, South Korea
- Beijing, China
- Shanghai, China
- Seoul, South Korea
Pounding the pavement
If you’ve read Ryan’s post about taking public transportation and the types of adventures he likes to have, you probably already have an idea of how we like to spend our vacations. That being said, the real proof is in the miles. Based on the S Health app on my phone, we averaged 11 miles everyday (when we weren’t stuck on the boat). If you’re curious how much actual walking we did, I dropped our stats into a spreadsheet, because #math.
Land tours vs exploring solo
With three days and two nights in Beijing, we decided to jump in on a land tour that Ry’s family booked. This was a huge help in terms of logistics, and our tour guide was extremely well-versed in the history and background of the locations we visited, but it did have the downside of being a pre-determined schedule that left zero room for meandering. I’ll write more about it in the post about Beijing – the overall experience wasn’t bad, but personally, I didn’t love being rushed around.
The best and worst of the trip
Since coming home, pretty much everyone I talk to has asked what the highlight of the trip was, and it’s been a hard question to answer. One friend put it pretty simply, and asked what I’ll remember most when I’m looking back on this in 10 years. Honestly?
The raccoon cafe! They were cute, mischievous, and honestly – that’s probably the only time I’ll ever play with a raccoon. Hahaha.
The worst was having a fever for 4-days when we got back from China. Luckily two of those days were sea days, but we didn’t get to see much of anything in Shanghai because of it.
That’s it for the summary – look forward to lots of posts about the specifics of where we went and what we did!
