Braking Boundaries

It’s always harder to get up on the second day of a ride, especially knowing that I would be riding all day again by myself. Being a social person it is certainly strange to only have myself to talk to all day. While riding there is always plenty of things to think about, it’s the downtime however, like eating alone, camping, or taking a break where I miss the company of my cycle buddies.

I left Suanbo with a gorgeous day ahead and found myself making my first real difficult ascent on a loaded bike. I’ve always been slow up hills but this gives new meaning to slow. As Dave would say “you need to earn your downhill” and that I did. I had a glorious ride down a beautiful valley near the Chungju lakes area and found a bunch of really nice camping grounds which I’m sure I’ll head back to in the near future. Other than that it was a pretty uneventful ride for the rest of the morning until I reached Danyang (단양) where I stopped for food and supplies. I had planned to camp tonight and wanted to make sure I had enough water just in case. (Carrying 6 liters)

Information in Danyang was helpful enough and showed me a valley about 30km away that I could camp in. (Mental note here : read the map carefully). Yip I got a little lost for a while. It’s fine to be lost in a car, but lost on a bike meant I had to cycle back the same way. A couple of steep hills later and some seriously hot weather and I was ready to call it a day stopping in the Namcheon valley. (남천)

After setting up camp beside a beautiful river, eating and cleaning up I soon found myself bored, so I went to bed at the earliest time I have been to bed in a long time (7.30pm)