Ganghwa Island

On Saturday we rented a car for the day so we could drive out to Gangwha Island and visit fortress sites, a Buddhist temple and a dolmen site.  It was really nice to get away from the city for a day and be in an area where everything wasn't boxed in by sky scrapers.  We also got really lucky with the weather because it only sprinkled a little bit in all the time we were outside.  It poured sometimes when we were driving between places but we just lucked out with our timing.  The other interesting thing about the island was that there was not a single other American on the island that we saw.  Every single person that we saw was Korean.  It was fun being in a place that most tourists don't go.  Here are the pictures from our day.

This was at the first fortress we visited.

Alden and Daddy had a good time walking around the first fortress together.  Here is a little video of Daddy and son together.

Alden had a lot of fun exploring.  He really wanted to look over the edge of the wall to see water.  Here is a video of Alden looking over the wall at the water and Daddy finding good places to let Alden see the water from. He also wanted to touch all the different plants that we passed.

This was the rental car that we had for the day.

The second site we visited was a palace site that housed a place hundreds of years ago

This was the dolmen site that we visited.  The various dolmens marked group tomb sites.

This was the second fortress site.  It was the biggest fortress that we visited on the island.

They had tons of apple trees where they had bags over almost all of the apples that were growing.  It was interesting to see.

This was the highest point at the fortress where you could see almost everything that was nearby.  It served as an observation point.

Alden slept the entire time that we were at this fortress.

Alden woke up right as we were about to leave the fortress and so we let him sit with Daddy and play with the steering wheel for a few minutes.  Here is a video of it and you can see Alden is just as interested in the buttons on the steering wheel as the actual steering wheel.

At the next fortress we decided to let Alden walk some but before we were even inside the fortress he sat down and just sat there looking around at everything.

He finally stood up again when he found some interesting plants to go look at.  He also found a bunch of leaves on the path that he wanted to try and clean up as you can see in this video.

At this fortress we climbed up inside a building on the top of the wall.  Alden liked walking around inside there.  Here is a video of him inside that building.

When we went back to the car to go to the next site Alden wanted to sit in front with Daddy again.  We let him sit there for a couple minutes and have fun while we ate a snack.

The last fortress that we saw was really small but fun to visit.  I felt like this fortress was just the top turret of a castle that was missing it's castle.    It was a circular structure with a wall built so that you would be able to defend the shore from inside of there.  Alden loved riding on Daddy's shoulders.  He thought it was so much fun as you will see in this video.

Alden had fun walking around, exploring and look out through these holes in the wall.  You can see him exploring the last fortress in this video.

This was the last site we visited.  It was called Jeongdeungsa Temple.  It is a Buddhist temple that is still in use that you can go visit.  There is a lot of grounds surrounding the temple and it was nice to be able to walk through all of those.

We had a really good day and enjoyed our adventure.  (Sorry about some of the blurry camera shots but apparently Alden got his fingers on my camera lens part way through the day)