Some guy was singing karaoke last night pretty late and I heard something about kimchee, wish I knew what he was saying. Sally got bit up by mosquitoes but I was good...their tent is just the outer fly over the frame, Tori doesn't get bothered by it. I prefer to be enclosed because I am a wussy. At some point we were talking about visiting Jeju but being that we never really planned to deeply and with the limited amount of time left, we dropped that idea. We took it easy as there wasn't much riding left to do from here on out.
As we rode on, those ominous looking block apartments started to appear again reminding us that we are nearing civilization. As we neared the finish line, it got busier and busier with crazy highway ramp crossings that were quite hairy. There is no crosswalk light and the drivers, while they aren't dangerous, don't seem interested in stopping either. We went through several of these dangerous crossings and as we got closer and closer, the water started to look a little dirtier. One final bridge crossing, which was made difficult due to construction on the pedestrian path and we were on Eulsukdo. The finish was actually quite uneventful, as we battled through pedestrian traffic only to turn into a plaza with no finish line arch or anything. It was just a rock with a finish line below as you can see in the picture.
In any case, we were stoked to have finished the trip successfully. Being an idiot and overcome with relief, I trusted my front wheel to hold my bike up on a bike rack not meant for overloaded bikes. After taking the customary pictures and congratulating each other on finishing the ride, we heard a horrible noise and sure enough my front wheel had taco-ed from the weight. Luckily it was still ride-able although noticeably jacked up and wobbly. I had to unhook the brakes in the front so the bent wheel wouldn't rub. I remember reading about several options in regards to heading back to Seoul. One was to cycle back a ways on the cycling road to stay at a bus terminal, which I wanted to do because I did not want to cycle into the heart of Busan. I was overruled though so I begrudgingly followed Tori and Sally into Busan. We found a Krispy Kreme along the way and so we stopped there for a donut and coffee. It was quite warm today as well. Luckily the weather has been pretty nice minus the first day of rain.
As I predicted, not to sound like a know it all, it became un-rideable due to the people traffic and whatnot. We pushed our bike through what felt like hoards of people after spending 8 days of riding away from cities. I was getting annoyed by this and also because we had to push our bike for a few more miles to get to Busan Station (it is not close to the finish line at all, and depending on the route annoying to say the least). We stopped at a restaurant for lunch of pot stickers and egg pancakes. We continued pushing and had to go through a few smog choking tunnels before finally reaching Busan Station.
Once at Busan Station we went straight to the ticket counters to buy our ticket for tomorrow. After securing our tickets, we rode around and found a guesthouse nearby but the owner wasn't there so we settled with a motel for 80,000won. After cleaning up, we headed out for a celebratory dinner and to look around Busan...definitely not as posh feeling as Seoul and noticeably more Russian (assuming) tourists. They had a Chinatown nearby and a bunch of alleys with tons of vegetable/meat/seafood vendors. We found a restaurant to our liking and ordered the beef hotpot which was beef backbone soup...all the meat and marrow was oozing out of the hotpot, it was quite beefy and delicious. Afterwards we headed over to McDonalds for a cherry blossom soft serve cone which is just the soft serve coated with pink chocolate. We headed back to the motel as it started to rain a bit. Tomorrow would be a laborious day of breaking down the bikes and lugging them to the station and then lugging them through Seoul.
