Friday, September 14, 2018

new walking route

On many, many occasions, I've passed by the place where the Yangjae Creek flows into the Tan Creek, but it wasn't until two nights ago that I finally decided to zig instead of zag, which is how I found myself leaving the Tan Creek path and walking back along the Yangjae Creek path—a part of that path that I had actually never walked on before. This heretofore-unwalked part of the Yangjae path was, in fact, the path's beginning: I noticed the painted meter markers beginning with "100." Normally, when I hit the Yangjae Creek path, I start from my workplace in Daechi-dong, walk to the creek, and take up the path by Yeongdong Bridge #6, which is at the 900-meter mark. I have now walked the previously unwalked 900 meters of the beginning of the Yangjae Creek path; it feels a bit like filling in a crucial blank on a form, satisfying my nerdy sense of completism.

If I start from my apartment building in Gaepo-dong (about 25 minutes' walk from Daechi-dong) and walk toward the Tan Creek, I can cross over the local section of the nearby Suseo Interchange via a footbridge, turn right, walk 15 minutes south to a main artery (a street that branches off the enormous Songpa-daero), walk back north the way I came, pass the footbridge, and keep walking toward the lower part of the Tan Creek path that eventually goes to the Han River. From there, I can hit the meeting-point between the Tan and the Yangjae and, now on the Yangjae Creek path, walk past all my old, familiar staircases (which I did last night—all fourteen of the biggies). I do my staircases, then take my normal route home. The total step count for this new Tan-Yangjae walk is about 23.5K steps, or almost four hours' walking at about 100 steps per minute. If I were to walk that route twice in one session, that would equal a day's walk toward Incheon, or around 30 kilometers. I might do that this weekend so as to get in one final practice walk before the biggie at Chuseok.

I like the new route. At night, there aren't too many people on it even with the nice, post-typhoon weather we've been having. The route is also long enough that I don't have to walk an especially ugly section of the Tan Creek path that approaches the Han River; that's my least favorite part of the path I normally hike whenever I'm going Han-ward. Now, I can just swing back west at the meeting-point of the two creeks and stay where there's plenty of greenery to keep me entertained. It's a good route. Am glad I found it.



No comments: