Traveling often delivers surprises.
Take for instance our arriving back to our Airbnb yesterday to discover that we were sharing a three-bedroom unit with a family of small children and a group of young men.
Our hostess asked us about having one of the young men into our bedroom of six bunk beds, but that is where we drew the line. Drew told our hostess, “We would prefer not to,” and she said okay.
You travel and roll with the punches. As long as we are generally safe, bring on the oddities. Makes for a good story.
Like today. We checked out of our Airbnb and made our way to the airport around 9 in a drizzle and waited a couple of hours to board our short 40-minute flight to Jeju-do (Jeju Island). When we got there, Hertz car rental told us we needed a credit card to check a car out.
We didn’t have a physical credit card because the other day, someone at a California Maverik (who didn’t have a physical card) somehow managed to rack up $100 in fraudulent charges and we had to close down that account. How’s that for irony?
So anyway. We took the airport shuttle once again, back to the airport and went through the rigamarole of applying for a car through a local rental company, but this time, they let us rent using a debit card instead. * Sigh of relief *
We piled into our rental car (which was the same brand and model as the one Drew’d been driving last week), and lunched at a place with table stoves and Je-ju’s famous pork belly strips.
Then we stopped at a lighthouse point with a lighthouse that inspired either awe or a guffaw depending on the angle you were looking from.
After which, the kids went silly doing a panoramic shot and having us run ahead so we could have multiple versions of ourselves. (You will have to ask the kids how that worked, exactly.)
Jeju was not the tropical island I was imagining it to be (it is mostly black lava rock beaches with gray and cold swirling waters that might be attributable to the stormy weather) but it does have a Hello Kitty Museum. So all in all it balances it out. We are crossing our fingers for good weather tomorrow for a hike. The kids and Drew sweetly said they would tolerate enjoy the Hello Kitty museum with me in a couple of days.
We are now in our Airbnb after getting in and walking to dinner in the neighborhood, where our new food adventure was octopus. I almost felt bad cutting up its strange-looking tentacle, but the kids reminded me it was no longer alive, so I suppose that made me feel better. It’s chewy and not very flavorful, but great for bragging rights.
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