shoeses

It's not completely official yet (I'm awaiting final confirmation from our HR department*), but it's looking as if I will indeed have a chance to hike from Seoul to Busan along the Four Rivers Trail again this year—in the fall, this time, instead of in the spring like in 2017. My "vacation" will be starting on September 28 and will end on Friday, October 25, which means I won't actually be at work again until Monday, October 28. That ought to be plenty of time to do what was, last time, a 26-day walk.

The shoes I bought last year have already been worn down, so I had to purchase a new pair. Risking Amazon again, I managed to find the exact same make and model of New Balance walking shoe that I'm currently using. Because I'm still experiencing occasionally painful toe-bumping up front, though, I upped the size from 11.5 inches to a full 12.

My new shoes arrived a few days ago, and I wore them all day on Friday. I'm happy to report there were no problems: they fit perfectly on the first try, and they didn't bother me the entire day. That's fantastic news. I'm going to put these shoes aside, for now, and keep using my regular shoes until early September. Then, in the weeks before my walk, I'll switch to the new shoes and do some significant distance-walking with them as a way to train.

Next up: finding the proper belt for my hip-belt assembly. (This may simply be a matter of replacing the buckle of my leather belt with a better buckle.)

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*I've discussed this before, but the plan this year is to do two weeks of paid vacation and two weeks of unpaid vacation. With a new boss at the helm, I can't do what I did last time and rely on a shit-pile of comp hours to allow me to have an entirely paid vacation. The immediate implication, unfortunately, is that I'm not going to be able to pay off my scholastic debt this calendar year: it'll have to be paid off by the spring of 2020. That has long been my fallback plan, so now we definitely know that the fallback plan has become Plan A. Et voilà.