August 20, 2006
Boise, Idaho is where we've spent the last week in recovery. The tail end of the trip in the U.S. was, sadly, over-planned, over-optimized and over-strategized, which left us in a haggard state. Minutes after arriving at SFO, we sped in a rental car toward Portland. Of course, in the bay area "speeding" means going about 10 mph because there's so much traffic, but still, the jump from the flight to the car was hurried. In May, before leaving for Seoul, we had planned to camp at Mt. Shasta; however, we were too exhausted to make it that far and ended up camping at Stony Gorge Reservoir, which is a fine place to be unconscious from jet-lag, even with loud, obnoxious Humvee-driving neighbors. In the morning, we drove too quickly past some beautiful countryside, and waved out the car window at Mt. Shasta, before arriving in Portland to visit family. We had a great, but not long enough, time visiting and got to go on a peaceful Wilamette cruise before continuing to Boise.
While we've tried to recover since Monday, not all of the last week has been idle: several thousand pictures (seriously!) have been whittled down to several hundred, which were organized, captioned and now populate one of several online albums. Since we were unable to post pictures in China, some pictures have been added to old posts. We also finally managed to transcribe and post a few of the last blog entries from the trip and I got the GPS data downloaded and mapped. If you're a geek, like me, here are boring (or, maybe interesting) details about our trip:
- Within Asia, using buses, trains and ferries we moved from one accommodation to the next for a total of more than 7,400km (~4,600 miles), which works out to an average of more than 100km (~62 miles) per day. (Of course, the distance would be longer if I included the walking, hiking, motorcycle rickshaws, a traghetto, an inertial ropeway, subways and taxis, but that seems like overkill.)
- Details about where we stayed on each night of the trip are organized in a table. On average accommodations cost $32.42 per day, while the average cost of staying in either a tent, hotel/hostel or transport (with a bed) was $2.92, $26.58 and $204.04 per day, respectively--each roughly ten times more expensive than the next, which, ironically, is inversely proportional to how well we usually slept in each of the types.
