bus tix failure and Plan B

[This is re: a planned Sangju-to-Andong walk over Chuseok break.]

After work, I went to Express Bus Terminal Station, marched up to the Express Bus Terminal ticket area, and tried to get myself a ticket to Sangju for either tomorrow (Wed) or the next day (Thu). The machine said there were a few tickets for tomorrow morning, but I'm working tomorrow, so leaving in the morning isn't an option. Otherwise, tomorrow afternoon and all day on Thursday, there are no tickets at all: everything came up maejin/매진, i.e., sold out.

No sweat: we just move to Plan B. Always have a Plan B. Instead of Sangju-Andong, I'll do the first four days of the Four Rivers walk as a practice walk: a backpack on my back, my new Skechers on my feet, a full load of equipment inside the pack, a supply of water, and a backup pair of shoes in case the Skechers decide to give up the ghost. What's good is that I really like the first four days of the Four Rivers path, so this'll be fun. It'll also be a longer distance: 120 km as opposed to the mere 90 km of the Sangju-to-Andong route.

This means that I'll have to leave tomorrow night because I'm meeting my buddy Tom on October 2, which is a Monday. So the schedule is:

Wednesday night (9/27): train out to Incheon
Thursday (9/28): walk from Incheon to Gayang Station (western Seoul), 32-33K
Friday (9/29): walk from Gayang Station to my own apartment, 30K
Saturday (9/30): walk from my apartment to Hanam City, 26K
Sunday (10/1): big-ass walk from Hanam to Yangpyeong, 35K

Monday (10/2): meet Tom

That ought to be a great test for my new shoes: I'll be encumbered and walking long-ish distances every day for several days in a row. And by staying local, I don't have to worry about Chuseok traffic. I can just hop on a subway and head out to Incheon, and when I'm done on Sunday, 10/1, I can eat lunch in Yangpyeong and take the subway back to Seoul. Easy peasy.

Sangju-Andong can wait for another time.

daywalking to recommence

With the approach of fall, and with summer temperatures finally coming down, the time has come to resume practice-walking during the daytime. This will apply mainly to the weekends, but with the Chuseok holiday coming up this week, I'll be doing the Sangju-to-Andong route that I did last year. Come to think of it, I might even strap on my backpack just to be able to train while encumbered. I've also found another route that I want to try: it runs from Gayang Station (familiar territory) to Unyang Station along a western stretch of the Han River. It's only 20-some kilometers, but it'll be a nifty change of scenery. My Korean coworker lives out close to Unyang Station, which is in Gimpo City.

Gayang-to-Unyang route. Click to enlarge. Right-click and select "open image in new tab" for full size.

What makes the new route interesting is that it's the part of the Han that I routinely miss on my way to Incheon. You see the green flag where the starting point is? Not far after that, I normally turn left and west to follow the Ara Canal (아라뱃길) out to Incheon and the west coast (see the canal?). The Han goes its separate way, swinging north and spilling out into the ocean not far from North Korea. I don't plan to go as far as the river's end, and from what I've seen on various maps, that might not even be possible, anyway. But going to the northeastern part of Gimpo might prove very interesting. The area around Unyang Station has a few very large parks that seem worth exploring. After I do my Sangju-to-Andong walk, I'll either hit the above route on the last day of Chuseok break or do the route the following weekend.

new shoeses

I'm a New Balance brand loyalist in need of new walking shoes for my upcoming long trek, but my boss insisted that the Skechers he wears are the bee's knees, so, after he'd badgered me enough, I consented to his ordering me a pair (I did pay him back for the shoes and shipping). They're 12.5 Extra-wides, which is a half inch down from the New Balance 13s I've been wearing since before last year's Jeju/Andong trip. 

The boss is out with COVID, but he called to say he'd gotten a flag from the Malltail delivery service (#1 delivery service to South Korea!), notifying him of a package's arrival. The boss gets Malltail deliveries at the office all the time, but he was sure that this package would be mine. Sure enough, I found the package at the office, and with the boss on the phone eager to hear my reaction, I took the shoes out of the box and their individual wrappings, pulled out the molded cardboard filling up the shoes' interior, and tried the walkers on, narrating what was happening so my boss could enjoy the moment. 

Thus far, all day in the office, I've found the shoes to be perfectly comfortable, but because they're relatively cheap and very light, I worry about how well they'll take the pounding of a 633K trail in varying weather. I kind of like the idea of not having any laces to worry about, but I'll need to get used to the brown color (no other colors were available at my size, and I normally go for dark blue or black). I'm going on a longish walk tonight to test the shoes out; I won't know how they perform over long periods in terms of wear and tear, but I'll have an idea of how comfortable they over over a period of three or so hours' walking.

No doubt I'll have more to report later.

UPDATE: I'm going to do something radical and sleep early tonight, then go for a walk from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. tomorrow morning. My sore throat seems to have gone away, and I'm not experiencing any mounting cold symptoms, so I think it's just a passing sore throat. We'll see how things are in the morning.

ALSO: I'll be taking my previous pair of shoes with me on this trek as backup, just in case something should happen to the delicate-seeming Skechers after a few hundred kilometers.

some shirts, but not all

My Kevin's Walk tees have all seen a lot of wear and tear, and the company that makes them, Teespring (now just Spring, but it's hard to default to the new name), doesn't exactly make high-quality shirts, so my tees have cracked prints, holes, and discolorations in the fabric. It's all pretty horrific, and these tees should probably be retired. At my office, I have space on my work station's partition to pin up a shirt that represents my adventures (an old bandanna is already hanging up there), so I might stick one of my retired tees in that space as a trophy of sorts. Meantime, I've ordered a mess of new tees to replace the old ones. About half of those shirts just arrived:

Tees for my 2020, 2021, and 2022 treks. Click to engorge.

The other half should be arriving soon. If they don't show up in a few days, I'll have to put in another request for a reprint and reorder.

hand, 3 weeks later

Things look a lot better after a bit more than three weeks:

The scabs are almost pickable, but if I leave them alone, they will likely fall off of their own accord. The healing is almost done. See here for a comparison.

same walk, three weeks later

The 33K walk I just did (Friday night to Saturday morning) was better than and just plain different from the previous walk in many ways. I didn't arrive as early as I thought I would: I arrived much later, but I still started this Yangpyeong-Yeoju walk maybe 20 minutes earlier than the previous walk. This time around, I arrived at about 10:55 p.m., swung by the local convenience store, and bought some water. The night was pleasantly cool and stayed that way—almost an intimation of fall. With the absence of rain, the ground was dry, and I didn't have to worry about slipping in mud puddles that formed because of poor drainage along the path. I also got much farther along the path before the lights went out, and because the moon was shining so strongly (one day post-supermoon, I think), I had no trouble seeing the path even with the lights out. I tackled the one big hill with almost no problems, and I remembered not to talk out loud to myself as I went down the other side of the hill. That's how I avoided being barked at by the local dogs. I took way fewer photos this time, and I also rested less—only five minutes every time I sat down, which was only twice as opposed to three or four times on my previous walk. As a result of these and other factors, my walk was a whole hour shorter: I arrived at the Yeoju Inter-city bus terminal at 7 a.m., almost exactly eight hours after I'd started. I did stop to stare at and photograph the spot where I fell last time, right at the Ipo Dam, and ah—before I forget: I have to write about the damn spider webs. Spiders usually come out at night and start weaving like crazy. This is true for most of the year, and I always forget to write about this phenomenon. I hate walking through spider webs because they get in my face and on my clothes. I also marvel at how I can get a faceful of webbing even though there are often no anchor points for webs at eye level. How do the web filaments rise so high? Upshot: spider webs are a big part of nighttime walks, and I sometimes deal with them even during the day. So—ready for a brief tour?

Here's a pic from early on:

A shot of that Christmas house again:

The approach to Ipo Dam, with the "fall zone" up ahead:

Almost there. The spot where I tripped is just beyond the white line that's just past the arrow. It turns out not to have been a tall ledge at all.

This was lit by my flash.

Below: where I fell. The ledge, which I'd originally described as feeling as though it were half the height of a curb, turned out to be maybe an inch tall. And I tripped over that. Dumb luck.

This was lit by my flash as well.

I lowered myself closer to the ground to get the following shot in an attempt to show the ledge more clearly. I'm not sure I succeeded.

It was a bright moon all night. Here's the moon and Yeoju Dam (at the 27K mark):

I couldn't believe I'd gotten to Yeoju Dam before sunrise.

The Hunminjeongeum in the darkness:

My camera takes in more light than the human eye. This tableau looked much darker to me.

Crossing the Yeoju Dam:

Daybreak, with a red/purple sky where the sun was about to come up:

I've crossed the river and am sitting at my usual bench by the admin building.

No fog this time. The low-hanging clouds began burning away as dawn took over:

A shot I don't think I've taken before, right as I'm arriving in the city:

A sign for Yeoju Cathedral (Yeoju Seongdang):

The front of Yeoju Cathedral:

Jesus about to announce the latest Lotto numbers:

A Rose of Sharon about a kilometer away from my destination, the Yeoju Inter-city bus terminal. I arrived at 7 a.m. and got a ticket for the 7:30 bus.

Another Rose of Sharon:

One of many webs still stuck to my shirt:

I walked through webs all night. Annoying.

All in all, a great walk. 33K in 7 hours and 50 minutes comes out to about 4.2 kph. Slow, but par for the course for me in these post-stroke days. I simply can't walk as fast or as strongly as I used to. Otherwise, though, my feet were fine aside from a little ache, and my eyes didn't gunk up like last time. (I brought along saline solution and a contact-lens container this time; I suspect these acted like talismans that kept the eye-gunk fairy away.) Despite the coolness, I was still a sweaty mess, but none of these difficulties stopped me from thoroughly enjoying this walk which, now that it's done, feels as if it were over too soon.

I didn't see any Joro spiders, but I know spider season is coming. As I walked past one distant neighborhood, a car alarm suddenly started blaring. I felt sorry for whichever poor bastard had to wake up and deal with that nonsense at 2:30 a.m. Along with the moon, Jupiter was hanging brightly in the sky, climbing until it hung directly over my head. I think Venus might've been out, too, closer to the horizon. At one point, a huge peloton of nighttime bikers rode past me, engaged in responsive chanting or shouting. I debated whether to wave, eventually deciding to remain quiet. One awesome aspect of the Yeoju Dam, which is big, is that you can hear the roar of the dam's water even when you're four kilometers away. Despite the peloton, the dam noise, and the occasional random car, the walk was mostly quiet, and the night felt close and intimate. I enjoy these nighttime walks, and since I'm in Korea and not a US city, I never worry about being accosted by crazies or being jumped by a gang. Everything feels safe and secure.

Right—a few disjointed thoughts before I flop into bed and sleep like the dead.

tee-shirt (& merch) update

I contacted Teespring to find out what the hell was going on with my tee shirts. I was thorough, giving Teespring all my order numbers as well as my DHL tracking numbers. Teespring concluded that the shipments were all probably lost in transit, which is not a good sign, and which might be a commentary on how bad the global supply-chain problem has gotten. Anyway, Teespring offered two choices: (1) store credit equal to the value of the lost items, or (2) the reprinting and re-sending of my shirts "as a one-time courtesy." I chose the latter, and I hope the shirts arrive soon. My actual 2023 walk tee was ordered a few weeks later, and it's scheduled to arrive any day now, but I'm worried that the bad-luck fairy might have cursed that shirt (and other merch) as well. The 2023 shirt is estimated to arrive anywhere from August 30 to September 4, so it's not quite time to get worried. I also ordered merchandise in the form of a pint glass, a die-cut sticker, and a mug; those items are scheduled to arrive anywhere from September 8 to September 13. Here's hoping I get everything before the walk happens. If not, then Plan B: I'll walk while wearing an older shirt. No biggie.