Sunday, April 12, 2020

the end-of-April walk

I have a string of seven calendar days in a row for vacation spanning the end of April to the beginning of May. I had been thinking about hiking the route from Sangju City to the Andong Dam, but I'm hesitating for a few reasons. The hike from Sangju City Hall to the dam itself is a bit under 90 km, i.e. a three-day walk in terms of raw distance. However, when I looked at Naver Map to see what sort of terrain and facilities I'd be encountering along the way, I discovered that the first half of the walk is—at least at first blush—completely devoid of hotels, motels, and yeogwans. If I were willing to camp, this wouldn't be a problem, but I'm not exactly eager to camp along this route. When I did finally find a hotel along the route, I saw that it was 36 kilometers away from the dam itself, i.e., about 42% of the entire route. That's a doable walk, but not one that I'd look forward to.

I'm going to puzzle over the matter further. It could be that I've missed some hotel, motel, yeogwan, or minbak along the way. I'll scour the map more thoroughly, but in the meantime, I think discretion may be the better part of valor in this case. To wit: the Andong Dam will now become Plan B, and Plan A will be to do a walk I know very well, from Incheon to Yangpyeong. That's a four-day, 120-km trek, and since it'll happen during a 7-day break, I'll have plenty of recovery time once I'm done. I'll probably train out to Incheon the night before vacation actually begins, then walk all the way to Yangpyeong, thus leaving me with three full days to recover before I have to be back at work. So that's the plan for now. More later.



2 comments:

Daniel said...

Consider a brief excursion along the East Sea coastal path? Say from 강릉 - 양양? Better views and tons of accommodation options along the way

Kevin Kim said...

It's a thought! Thanks.