Yonghe City, Taiwan

Thursday-Saturday January 5-7, 2012

Every 2 years we make a trip back to Taiwan to see Joe’s family. This will be my 3rd trip since we were married in 2007.

Thursday we dropped Chance off at the vet at 8am for the next 9 days. We walked .7mi from our house to take 2 buses and the light rail to the Sea-tac airport. There is no way we would have thought of taking public transit like this on the east coast, but you really can’t beat the round-trip cost of $7 instead of a pricey cab fare or an even greater fee to park at the airport for that long. We flew from Sea-tac to Tokyo, a 10 hour flight. This was Jackie once we were through security at Seatac airport waiting on our flight as we watch other flights take off.

The long flight was a perfect way to catch up on our movies (even though Joe has seen a lot of them already on his many business trips). Moneyball, Larry Crowne, Friends with Benefits, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (up to the final few minutes). The flight from Tokyo to Taoyuan International Airport was close to 3 hours. We arrived late Friday night, January 6, 2012. That is a full 24 hours of airport time. We shaved off 2 hours from the Detroit flight to Japan plus having to take a third flight from Charleston to Detroit. I went straight to bed and Joe stayed up for a bed visiting with his Mom.

On Saturday January 7, we had breakfast at the World Soybean Milk Magnate, our usual spot in Yonghe. We searched for a My Fone store so Joe could get a prepaid 3G cell phone plan for his iPhone while we were here in Taiwan. The first store we went to wasn't open until 11am so we went over to the National Taiwan Library for a little while until they opened.

The 10 day phone plan has been great. The GPS has saved us from getting too lost quite a few times.

Dad made a great lunch at the house. He even peeled all the shrimp shells just for Jackie before cooking them.

We aren’t doing as much in Taiwan this trip as we did 2 years ago when Matt joined us and Joe’s Dad’s health was better. If you want to get a better idea of what Taiwan is like and how beautiful this island can be read our old blog we did for that 2 week trip in late 2009:

http://joeliangtravel.blogspot.com/