Walk Thoughts #26: another item for the to-do list+ distance recalculation

Another To-do Item

I'm no longer going to buy a CamelBak pack (I'll be hanging the bladder off my backpack), but I still need to buy reflector strips and trekking poles (both of which I can get tomorrow if I'm fast enough out the door at the end of the day: Costco closes at 10PM, and both Lotte Mart and Home Plus close at midnight). Along with that, I suddenly realized I need to do one other thing: I have to get extra holes punched in my second leather belt.

Some background: I have two leather belts. Over the past few years, I've been using a big, thick, nasty, Texas-style belt that, luckily, doesn't have an obnoxious, Texas-style buckle. That belt is now part of my backpack's hip-belt system. This has forced me to fall back on my other, long-unused leather belt for my everyday needs. The problem is that, if this is the belt with which I'll be holding up my pants during the walk, then I'm going to need new holes in it because I'm already down to that belt's final hole. (I'm down to the final hole on the first belt as well, but because that belt is now functioning as a hip belt, it has farther to wrap around before I can buckle it tight. No new holes needed.) I'll pay the belt-hole-punching ajeossi a visit this Saturday and get the hole-punching done. It's amusing to speculate on just how much weight I'll be dropping: will I need three new holes? Four? Five? Probably not five. I don't expect to lose that much weight in three weeks. When I finished my hike in 2008, I had gone down from 300-some pounds to around 250 pounds, i.e., I was still 50 pounds overweight. I'm not expecting any miracles of slimming on this hike.

Distance Recalculation

I was wrong about Naver Map: you can auto-calculate distance along bike routes. This feature, once I discovered it (and was overjoyed), saved me a lot of time and grief as I redid the numbers, and I now have revised distances for my stops. The new kilometer total is 540.6 km, not 503.7 km, and this new figure is much closer to reality. Some of the numbers changed radically enough that I'm no longer going to retroactively change the previous leg-by-leg post: instead, I'm just going to rewrite the post and repost it with the new numbers, adding information like how often I'll be away from water and whether there are any inns or campsites I might have missed. For now, though, here's a list of the old and new figures:

NB: red font = GAIN in mileage (boo); blue font = REDUCTION in mileage (yay)

Day 1, Leg 1 (camp)
Previous: 15.5 mi./25 km
Revised: 17.31 mi/27.86 km

Day 2/Leg 2 (inn)
Previous: 15.2 mi./24.4 km
Revised: 17.4 mi./28 km

Day 3/Leg 3 (inn)
Previous: approx. 10 mi./16 km
Revised: 7.77 mi./ 12.5 km

Day 4/Leg 4 (inn)
Previous: approx. 12 mi./20 km
Revised: 7.46 mi./12 km

Day 5/Leg 5 (camp)
Previous: 18.6 mi./30 km
Revised: 23.86 mi./38.4 km

Day 6/Leg 6 (inn)
Previous: 15.6 mi./25 km
Revised: 18.52 mi./29.8 km

Day 7/Leg 7 (inn)
Previous: approx. 17 mi./27.6 km
Revised: 15.78 mi./25.4 km

Day 8/Leg 8 (camp)
Previous: 9.4 mi./15.1 km
Revised: 11.36 mi./18.28 km

Day 9/Leg 9 (minbak)
Previous: approx. 11 mi./17.7 km
Revised: 13.58 mi./21.85 km

Day 10/Leg 10 (camp @ campground)
Previous: approx. 18 mi./29 km
Revised: 19.13 mi./30.78 km

Day 11/Leg 11 (hotel)
Previous: 16.6 mi./26.7 km
Revised: 17.08 mi./27.48 km

Day 12/Leg 12 (camp)
Previous: 10.6 mi./17 km
Revised: 11.74 mi/18.89 km

Days 13-14/Leg 13 (inn)
Previous: 20.4 mi./32.8 km
Revised: 19.86 mi./31.96 km

Day 15/Leg 14 (camp, maybe hotel in town [Daegu])
Previous: 17 mi./27 km
Revised: 16.6 mi./26.72 km

Day 16/Leg 15 (inn)
Previous: approx. 14 mi./22.5 km
Revised: 13.6 mi./21.89 km

Day 17/Leg 16 (camp)
Previous: 17.8 mi./28.7 km
Revised: 22.79 mi./36.67 km

Days 18-19/Leg 17 (camp & camp again)
Previous: 25.7 mi./41.3 km
Revised: 33.41 mi./53.77 km

Days 20-21/Leg 18 (hotel)
Previous: approx. 30 mi./48.3 km
Revised: 33.85 mi./54.48 km

Day 22/Leg 19 (Toyoko Busan Station #1 Hotel! woo-hoo!)
Previous: 18.6 mi./30 km
Revised: 16.94 mi/27.26 km

Day 5 and Days 17-21 show some rather significant changes in distance. As I noted before, this is because I had been using the auto-calculated road measurement, not the bike-route measurement. While the roads and bike routes do often match as they follow a given watercourse, there are times when the bike route can be either longer or shorter than the route taken by heavier vehicles. Still: what's a few miles between friends, eh? Leg 17 is probably the worst, with its 8-mile variation. That works out to nearly three hours' difference in walk time, assuming I'm going very slowly by the end of the day.

And that's it for the moment. Expect a more detailed blow-by-blow account soon.