pour de vrai cette fois

Right—so I'm setting out on a two-day, 60-kilometer walk tomorrow. I'll wake up around 5 a.m. and be out of my place before 6, ideally. Because this won't be a four-day walk, I plan to travel very light: no big backpack, no heavy poncho, and only a single liter of bottled water for Day 1 of the walk—no 3-liter hydration bladder. It's winter, so I won't drink much.

It's going to be ass-chappingly cold when I start out in the morning. The most recent forecast says the high temperature, tomorrow, will be slightly below freezing (31℉, -0.6℃), then slightly above freezing on Sunday (34℉, 1.1℃). I'll be wearing sweatpants beneath my hiking pants to keep my lower body warm; I'll have my winter coat and liner on, plus my blue windbreaker, plus a winter vest that my ex-boss bought for me while he was in the States. Aside from an extra change of clothes, a toiletry bag, and the aforementioned supplies, I won't be bringing anything else. I'll simply have a very light day pack on my back (so, hopefully, no back problems to contend with), a trekking pole in my hand, and a song in my heart (or, failing a song, some sort of prodigious farting noise).

Unlike my Incheon route, the route to Yangpyeong City isn't evenly divided: it's about 25 km the first day and 35 km the second, so I'm gonna be hurtin' on the second day. With the new route I'm walking on Day 2—one that doesn't take me into town on a wild goose chase for a nonexistent certification center, I shouldn't be on the trail longer than nine hours. As I mentioned before, I'd recorded twelve hours of walking in 2017. There won't be any wasted motion this time. And because I won't be walking on Monday—I have to be back at work—it won't matter if I do end up walking 10 or more hours. I'll have the rest of the winter to rest my aching feet. If I arrive at my motel later in the afternoon, I'll simply put my feet up and rest for as long as the remains of the day allow.

On Monday morning, I won't need to hurry: I'll wake up in my motel room, shower if needed, then plod not even two kilometers over to the nearby train station, which doubles as both a Seoul subway line and a KTX line. I might splurge a bit and take the 10:40 a.m. KTX back into Seoul, a trip of one or two stops, then cab the rest of the way to my office.

A lazy part of me is glad I'm doing only 60 km and not 120 km over four days. The Day 2 route would also be the Day 3 route, you see, and doing 35 km back to back would be hellish. In 2017, Day 2 was when I ended up with my nasty blister, and while I don't think I'll get a blister this time around, I might have done so had the walk been for four days.

Anyway, as I said a few days ago in the comments, here goes nothing. No rain is forecast for this weekend, and Saturday is supposed to be bright and beautiful. Sunday's weather will be more gloomily English in tenor, but that's all right. I recall that the route was a beautiful one, with plenty of nifty tunnels to walk through. Even if the sky is brooding all day, the earth will offer no shortage of welcome sights.