Fuck! My suitcase!

So instead of heading to the lovely island of Jeju-Do we decided to rent a car and go somewhere Darren has NEVER been before... COSTCO! So Arlene takes the train to Daejeon to meet us, not expecting to wait for 2 hours for our arrival.

Why did it take so long?

1. We missed the exit for the Xpressway to Gwangju.

2. We made a wrong turn IN Gwangju that led us about 20 minutes out of town. On the positive, the countryside was beautiful.

3. Ending up on the South side of a town that has about 3 million people when we needed to be in the city center. Come on, how hard could it be to find the Costco? I've been there before!?

4. Stopping and receiving directions from the entire staff of the Highway and Transportation department and being personally directed out of the parking lot to ensure our safe departure. Thanks buddy.
5. Where did you say that Costco was again lady?

After we got the map from Highway, Darren was in charge of leading us to the promised land that has dill pickles, chedder cheese, frozen blueberries and Kashi! oh yeah, and Darren's mom who has been waiting for 2 hours.

Once in Costco, it was smooth sailing. Got everything we needed and were in and out within an hour.

So thinking that all is well and we'll still be able to drive in daylight we were on our way back to Mokpo. After finally reaching the city limits and seeing our highway ahead of us and rush hour traffic behind us we thought we were on our way with shitty lattes in hand.

Until we heard a shriek from the backseat... FUCK! My suitcase!

WHAT!? you're joking right? do you really need that suitcase?

We pull over and Arlene says, "my suitcase, it's at Costco behind the desk". Oh my god! we all just started to laugh. We turned the car around and headed back into rush hour traffic. Little did we know that this was not the worst point of the ride home.

After some cursing and finally figuring out our way back to Costco, we were back on the road with the suitcase and the new set of flannel sheets that Arlene decided she HAD to have from her second trip to Costco. At this point we have now lost an hour of travel time and it's getting dark fast. We finally get on the highway when Darren then shouts out his nugget of information, we missed the turn off! another FUCK! No problem, we'll just turn around off this road and get back to where we need to be. Hours later we're still on the same road. Feeling like we're going in circles we finally find the road we need to be on but it is definitely NOT the xpressway. This is the scenic route! Up, down, around, back, up repeat. Top speed on this mountain road was about 60km/h. A drive that should have taken us 3 hours, ended up taking about 5.

All together, I spent about 9.5/10 hours driving in Korea. We almost saw the entire country. It was very beautiful and all in all it was a lot of fun. I'm just glad that we made it home in one piece, didn't run into any animals along the road (probably b/c they're all chained up), avoided an accident and only received honks, didn't get a speeding ticket, and best of all... there wasn't any on coming traffic coming towards us when I accidentally started driving in the wrong lane after the lanes split after a construction site!!