The plan for the day is the same as last year, meet at 10 am in Fitchburg to ride to lunch at Seven Acres Dairy in Paoli. Last year it poured just after we arrived for lunch, and this year it is also going to rain, just a little later in the day.

The ride is a little different this year, it’s an approximately 33-mile loop that you can ride multiple times. There is also a 20-mile shortcut available. There is one remote rest stop with food and porta-potties and then another back at Trek headquarters.

We start the day with a ride from the East Madison Trek store at 8am. Then we head to the Trek headquarters in Waterloo, WI for lunch and an early afternoon tour of the Project One portion of the factory.

Uneventful drive to Gimpo airport in the morning and an uneventful flight to Tokyo. There was a Korean boy band on our flight with lots of luggage some handlers. We didn’t find out which band it was. We had a long wait for driver after meeting our guide.

Today is a day in the Life experience of Oeam village, a historic community dating back to the Joseon period.

Normally our tour group would start very early in the morning with a drive to the DMZ. But our tour guide was successful in getting a group reservation for the afternoon, so we start the morning with a short talk and a Q&A session with Pak Yu-sung who successfully defected from North Korea at age 17.

We start our day with a visit to the National Museum of Korea. It is the third most visited museum in the world behind the Louvre in Paris and the Vatican Museum.

Today we start the official tour with the welcome briefing.

We had breakfast in the hotel and talked with our trip leader even though the tour officially starts tomorrow. He told us that last night was the Lotus Lantern Festival Parade for Buddha’s Birthday celebration. The lanterns are still hanging at the Jogyesa Temple. The street in front of it would be shut down today and booths set up selling food and other items. The festival is on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List.

We planned to arrive one day early for our guided tour of Korea and Japan. This will allow us to get through the 14 hour time difference. We have been getting up one hour earlier each of the past four days. We get up at 3 am the morning we leave to catch a 3:50 am ride to the airport for our first flight to SFO.