travel dates and route

I spoke with my boss earlier this afternoon, and we hashed out my travel dates while also discussing route length. My original wish was to do the Four Rivers trail, which I haven't done in a few years. It's my favorite trail, and I miss it. But there was a chance the boss might have needed me at the office for this or that project, so I might have had to do a shorter walk—say, three weeks instead of the usual month. Thus, I developed a Plan B: I'd walk the entire Nakdong River from the Andong Dam to Sangju City, then eventually to Busan. Technically, I have done that entire stretch, but never in one go. The part of the Nakdong path from Sangju to Busan is the final portion of the Four Rivers path, and I've done that three times already. And last year, I walked due east from Sangju to the Andong Dam—an awesome four-day hike. This was mostly out of curiosity because I'd long wondered what the Sangju-Andong spur was like. 

As it turns out, the boss is fine with my taking my usual 29 days off (I do this by using a mixture of national holidays and comp time, i.e., working on weekends to stack up hours that I can expend as part of my vacation), so I'll be doing the full Four Rivers route—as is now noted on the blog banner.

Since my best Four Rivers walk was done in 2019, I'm most likely going to redo that walk. I have more time to plan than usual because the boss and I agreed that I'd start this year's walk a little later in the year, i.e., in mid-October instead of late September.

Stay tuned as more walk-related news comes in.

ADDENDUM: oh, yeah, those travel dates. I'll be leaving Incheon on Saturday, October 14, and finishing at Busan on Saturday, November 11. The blog's new banner shows part of the final stretch—a 7K portion that's tree-lined and paralleling the Nakdong River. I don't know why I love this particular stretch so much, but I do.