Day 18, Leg 14

Today is a rest day, and while I have a couple errands that will take me out of the motel (Lee Motel, with a special-offer price of only W20,000 a night!), I'll be spending most of today in bed and off my poor, screaming feet.  My left foot has overtaken my right foot in the chronic-pain department, and a brief experiment, yesterday afternoon, with a different pair of orthotic insoles didn't help matters.  Bizarrely enough, this level of pain, which I hadn't experienced before of the arrival of blisters on my left sole, makes the walk feel more normal and familiar:  in both of my previous walks, I was blister-y and in chronic pain well before Day 18.

Day 18.  Hard to believe I have only eleven more days to go.  The feeling of finality won't start to truly sink in until I reach Namji-eup, which will happen after an arduous day of walking.  (The walk to Namji-eup is one of two or three days involving a big, nasty hill.  Accept every hill, as I said last year.) 

So let's talk about how yesterday went.  Yesterday's hike was 35K according to Naver Map.  In previous years, Naver plotted the route at around 32K.  I don't know what changed.  Maybe the earth really is shifting around, messing up my waypoints' relative positions.  That issue notwithstanding, yesterday's walk was long, but not impossible.  I peeked at my blog entry from last year and discovered that I had arrived at the Lee Motel at 6 p.m. (my photos' file names are a sequence of numbers that are date-and-time stamps, making it easy to figure out chronology), so this year's arrival-in-the-dark happened only an hour later (7:05 p.m.).  Pain-wise, things got dicey a few times because of the pressure from my left foot's blisters, at least one of which sits deeply inside my foot.  But overall, I was able to maintain a slow, steady pace. 

The walk was flat and beautiful, but there was a long, noisy stretch alongside a main thoroughfare in Gumi City that would have been nice to avoid.  This section of the Nakdong River is especially wide and peaceful, and toward the end of the stretch, over the last five or so kilometers, there's an enormous tract of half-manicured parkland that goes on and on.  The walk from Libertar to the Lee Motel took me from Gumi City (구미시) to Chilgok-gun (칠곡군), which is where the Chilgok Dam (칠곡보) is, within sight of my motel.  Major hills were absent; I'll hit them over the course of the next week or so.

When I stopped at a particular convenience store, the lady at the register remembered me from last year.  That's always a warm-fuzzy moment, when someone remembers you.  It doesn't happen that often; I often get blank looks when I tell someone that I came by this way last year and in 2017.  Not that I blame anyone for not recalling a visitor who showed up briefly, then disappeared for a year or more.  I'm just some random, forgettable foreign weirdo.

I normally take breaks every 12,000 steps as a way to rest, take a load off my feet, and drug up.  Yesterday, it was as if all the planets had aligned:  exactly every 12,000 steps, some sort of rest stop would appear.  First, there was an ancient, rotting picnic table.  Next, there was a newly opened convenience store that blared awful Korean pop music and had some flimsy tables and deck chairs.  Neither of these places had space for a bloke to lie down, but the third rest stop, at the 36,000-step mark, was absolutely perfect for someone wanting to stretch out horizontally:  a long, low wall with wooden slats on top, turning the wall into a lengthy bench, out in the middle of a huge, empty riverside park.  Perfect place to take a gratifying piss, choke down some meds, and sleep for forty-five minutes, which I did with no regrets.  Those naps (which usually last only thirty minutes) are some of the best moments of my day:  they make up for the suck-ass quality of the previous night's sleep, and they're the moments when I'm at my most content.  My legs are draped over my backpack, my fingers are laced over my chest, and my hat is covering my face, protecting it from the sun's harsh glare.  That's true bliss.  

What's not blissful is the excruciating pain of a strange pair of orthotic insoles.  My boss had given me a nifty-looking pair of insoles as a gift for my trek; I thanked him and promised to try them out even though I already have a pair of insoles inside my shoes.  Well, I'm sorry to say that the boss's insoles, which came from Costco, became agonizingly painful after just a few hours' use.  I had no choice but to switch back to my original pair.  The Costco soles began digging into the flesh of my heels, threatening to create new blisters.  Putting my original insoles back on brought instant relief.  I'm not going to throw the boss's insoles away; I can never bring myself to throw away anything given as a gift.  I'll put them in indefinite storage, keeping them as examples of what not to wear on long hiking trips.

Today, October 15, is also my brother Sean's birthday.  Happy 41, Big Boy!  Two days later, he and Jeff celebrate their fifth anniversary as a married couple.  Already five years!  Time flies.

Later today, I'll be using a sewing kit I bought to repair my ripped pants pocket.  Wish me luck.

Here are some pics from yesterday's long walk.