It's been 30 degrees this week! Can you believe that? Summer is already here and I know there will be only a few more days that I can bear to wear pants. That's alright though, I've been lovin' skirts lately. They're only occasionally problematic when you ride a scooter... that pesky wind can be a nuisance. And don't get me started on pencil skirts! I wore one for a presentation today and nearly tipped over trying to get out of my parking space!
This past weekend Cam and I went to a little place called
鯉魚潭 LiYu Lake near Hualien. We took the train from Taichung Station all the way to Hualien. It took six hours! It goes by pretty quickly though because it's comfortable and I had a whole bunch of episodes of "Friends" on my phone to watch! That show never gets old. There's a faster train called the "Taroko Express" I believe, but they don't allow bikes and we had one, so 6 hours it was.
From Hualien Train Station we took a cab for about 30 minutes (~$500NT) to our hotel right on LiYu Lake. We stayed at
在水一方 (Zai Shui Yi Fang) or the Lake House Inn. It's
on the lake shore and has the most beautiful view. We requested the "room with a view" which has a huge window looking right over the lake and gardens below.
 |
| View from our room |
Saturday noon Cam had a race, so we slept in and enjoyed the sunshine on the lake until the race began. The race started out in the lake, then a bike course through the mountains, then a run twice around the lake. It was a really beautiful race course and Cam loved it!
Cam placed fourth in his age group for the olympic distance triathlon!
The next day we rented a tandem bicycle! It looked like a cute romantic sort of idea and Cam wanted to show me the race course, so we planned to ride it around the course. Well, the bike was really heavy and only had a couple of gears, and we were a little tall for it. So we got about 5km into the ride and realized that the hill at the end of the course was going to kill us or make us kill each other, so we turned around and rode around the lake instead! Next time, I would rent individual bikes. Cute in theory, kind of inconvenient in practice. We had a great time though and laughed at ourselves for how slowly we were going. People were waving and cheering for us while we made our way around on our silly bike!
We had a beautiful weekend and it was nice to get away. It rained a little so we didn't go swimming in the lake, but it would a beautiful place to kick back and go swimming in the summer. You can easily put spending a day or two here on your
list, and then head over to
Taroko Gorge.
