Hyeongjebong

Here I was thinking, "It's Sunday. I wrote about church last week. I can take a day off from blogging." And then Dan said, "Do you want to go on a hike with Simeon and me?" Erika had music prep to do for the women's meeting, so the three of us took off after lunch.

Destination Hyeongjebong in a national park right here in Seoul. Bong means peak. You guessed it. Like most hiking in Korea it was uphill.

After driving across town, we parked here, right on the highway in the background of the picture.

But 180 degrees from taking that picture, I took this one.

Of course, every Korean hiking spot includes a temple, but we didn't take the time to investigate this one. Notice how much younger the leaves are at the higher altitude. A lot of the flowering trees were still just in bud.

Simeon found a fireman hold a relaxing way to hike. Further along the trail, that hold became a matter of safety rather than laziness.

Despite being surrounded by nature, we were never far from the city.

Simeon wanted to picnic at every rocky lookout. Here we snacked on dried seaweed, a favorite of Simeon's.

There was no shortage of rocks to climb on.

And then there was this part of the trail. That is the trail you are looking at.

I was beginning to think we had gotten off on a side trail to a lookout, but no, the trail continued down the other side, almost as steep. There were knotted ropes as well as these bars to help us up.

According to my phone app, I did not reach 10,000 steps today, but I think I can be forgiven since it says we climbed the equivalent of 80 flights of stairs. That is not as high as it would have been to climb Lotte Tower instead of taking the elevator, but we were pretty tired on the way home.