well, it's finally done

I assume you've all forgotten by now that I had promised to go through my entire photo collection for my most recent trans-Korea hike and blow the pics up to 600-pixel width. This gesture was purely for those people too lazy simply to click on a picture and start the slide show for each day's images. 

Well, the image-enlarging is done, now. I worked at the project whenever I had the time and energy, and after a long slog, I blew up the last of the pictures just an hour or two ago. A lot of effort for no reward, and it's all for you, Dear Reader. Anyway, all the pics on Kevin's Walk 5 are now set to "very large," and the landscape-style images are all 600 pixels wide, while the tall portrait images, albeit narrower, are definitely larger than they had been.

To be honest, I think this'll be the last time I do such a thing. It's just not worth it, to me, when I have so many other projects in the pipe, to spend this amount of time and energy on something that most readers aren't even going to appreciate. My time is increasingly valuable as I creep toward my eventual death, so I'd rather use that precious time to accomplish meaningful tasks. If I were rich enough to have a young, sexy assistant to do this kind of scut work work me, I'd pay her (well, I'd pay her some; the privilege of my charm and blood-engorged body parts would cover the rest of the payment).

So if you're willing to go through this latest hike one more time, the images are ready. For those who do relive the trip, enjoy. 

I don't think I'll be hiking any more crowded, peninsular Korean coasts anytime soon. Too much goddamn civilization. Instead, I'll be researching the inland trails to see what's out there. The Four Rivers trail will be hard to beat, but I've been looking closely at the route to the Andong Dam; I had planned to hike that route before my stroke. Meanwhile, my buddy JW did a small part of the Jeju Olle Trail last winter. He says nothing has ever it beaten it for beauty. I hate hearing that because it sounds like a put-down of the trails I've walked, like the Four Rivers trail. While it's a mostly coastal trail, it's also a walker's path, not a road, so I'm interested. My main worry, with the Jeju trail, is the number of tourists. It may be best to hit it in the late fall, when things are cooler, so as to minimize the crowd problem. I'll talk with JW about this and come up with something.

Please don't take any of the above to mean I resent my readers. On the contrary, I'm always grateful for any readership. But I'm also not one to hold back with the bitching and moaning when a task become onerous, so I'm just bellyaching, here, while also looking at practical realities. Next hike, no blown-up images. Just click the first image in a blog post and take in the slide show. Even with the pics in Kevin's Walk 5 now enlarged, you can still do that. So I hope you do if you have the time.