The school year is winding down which means it's getting crazy busy. Time for a road trip! Twelve of us hopped into three cars and headed south to Kenting at the south end of the island where the beaches are beautiful and the air is clear. We left right after school, drove a couple of hours, checked into our hotels and were sitting down for dinner with margaritas in hand by 6:30. Not bad.

Lee and I were up early, naturally, and took a nice walk along the beach in town.

There's a street that's lined with little hotels that look out towards the water:

Half of our group stayed in one of those hotels. They didn't have room for all of us so I found another hotel one street up that was quite nice.

They adhered to the old Chinese custom of skipping floor number four.

Some buildings in the US don't have a 13th floor but here it's the 4th. The word for 4 sounds very similar to the word for death so it's a very unlucky number. Anyway, back to our little trip...

Back early in the fall we came down to Kenting and went to the nice beach outside of town for the day. We spent Saturday back at that beach.

Lee building a sand castle with Lawson.

Lee, Lawson, his mom Casey and Claire. It's nice to have kids along when you go to the beach.

The beach at 10:30 was pretty quiet. There were people hunkered down under umbrellas but not many in the water. By 3:00 the tour buses had dropped off their passengers and the beach was crowded with fully clothed tourists standing ankle deep in the water taking pictures of themselves not swimming in the ocean.

After enjoying the spectacle of watching a few of them getting knocked over by an unexpected wave (Waves at the beach?! Who knew?) we packed up, took showers, ate an early dinner and drove home. We were back in Kaohsiung in time for a nightcap and bed. If we owned a car I might be down in Kenting every weekend.

We don't own a car but we do have bikes and I'm back on mine so we went for a ride this (Sunday) morning. It was already into the 80's at 6:00 in the morning so went went early. We biked down to the harbor, took the ferry to Cijin Island and biked along the shore. There were more ships dotting the coastline than I ever remember seeing. I counted 50.