Our Travels

We've been traveling in Taiwan but have gotten behind on our photo sharing and blogging. Too busy taking and preparing for our trips, I suppose. Below is a listing of where we've been thus far and where we will be in the near future. Damon and I plan to write blogs about those trips and share our photos. Some of you may have received our KodakEasyShare Album about our Kenting trip. If you need a link try:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=swjryj2.22uzyh1u&x=0&y=x75vl8
which should get you to the (enormous) album. We each have a digital camera and go nuts on these trips. Each place has scenery more stunning than the last. I am currently playing with a site called Flickr for photo sharing. It is free but limits monthly uploads to 20 MB... as I said we take lots of pics. I will post photos of our Sun Moon Lake trip at Flickr soon. If you have any thoughts on which is a better system let us know. The Kodak Easy Share site will allow photo purchase while Flickr is strictly a photo sharing site.

Here is our travel itinerary into the next year:

• June 21, 2005 - Arrived in Taipei and had a mini-vacation at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Taipei.
• June 28, 2005 - Moved into our apartment in TienMu, vacation's over, time to get to work.
• August 13, 2005 - Made an overnight camping trip to Camp Taiwan located north of Taipei in the mountains of Yangmingshan National Park. See Damon's blog dated September, 01, 2005.
• September 8, 2005 - I made a solo, day trip to Yingke, a nearby town famous for it's pottery. Great shopping!
• September 17, 2005 - Three day trip to Kenting for the Moon Festival holiday. We visited Kenting National Park, the beach and the National Aquarium. See the Kodak site for our pictures of this beautiful area in the southern tip of Taiwan.
• September 24, 2005 - Two day trip to Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan. We stayed in a lovely Bed & Breakfast and hike around the lake. We stopped a small village on the way and had a fun bike ride. On the way back we got to tour a paper factory where they make beautiful handmade paper.
• September 29, 2005 - I made another trip to Yingke. As I said the pottery shopping is fantastic.
• October 7, 2005 - Four day trip to Taroko Gorge National Park. This has been our most phenomenal trip to date. Even with recent, heavy, typhoon damage to many of the hiking trails the gorge was incredibly beautiful. I will get photos of this trip (and all our trips) posted ASAP.
• November 5, 2005 - We are scheduled for a two day trip to BeiPu to explore the Hakka Culture of Taiwan. Our tour guide will be Amy Liu, cultural resources rep extraordinaire, she is one of the main reasons we had a really good "look-see trip" back in January and decided to take this assignment.
• November 24, 2005 - Hong Kong! We will be there for four days during Thanksgiving break. I've heard what a fun city it is to visit so I'm really looking forward to the trip. We will spend one day at the recently opened Disneyland Park near Hong Kong. I'm expecting it to be a very interesting cultural experience: Disney culture meets mainland China culture.
• December 22, 2005 - Austin and San Antonio for a two week dose of friends and family. We are going to do our best to spend as much time as possible visiting with everyone and making at least one trip to every restaurant that we've been missing.
• January 27, 2006 - Ten days in ???? We are undecided on where to spend Chinese New Year. We've been told that traveling in China at this time is too crazy. We are considering Palau, New Zealand or Japan. Any ideas or suggestions?
• March 2006 - We haven't planned this far in advance but we have a four day block off in early March and 11 days off later in the March/April for Spring Break. These will be opportunities for more great trips. We're expecting Thomas and Elva for a visit late in March-wahoo!
• May 2006 - Three days off in...??
• June or July 2006 - Back to the states for a visit.

As you can tell we are really trying to take advantage of our time in this part of the world. Should any of you want to join us for a trip let us know. We are spending our weekends at home in Taipei trying to explore the city as much as possible. We want to be ready to show our visitors all the great sites in and around Taipei. Come visit!

Margaret