Welcome to the new blog!

It's a bit early in the game, but welcome, one and all, to this latest walk blog of mine:  Kevin's Walk 5.  As a refresher, here are links to my previous walk blogs:

Kevin's Walk 4 (2020)

Kevin's Walk 3 (2019)

Kevin's Walk 2 (2017)

Kevin's Walk (2008)

The 2008 blog began as a chronicle of my attempt to walk across the United States.  I did about 600 miles, starting in White Rock, British Columbia (just across the US-Canada border), heading south along the I-5 corridor to Portland, Oregon, turning east and following the Columbia River to about Umatilla, then heading northeast to Walla Walla, Washington.  I stopped in Walla Walla after an injury I'd sustained around Mile 150 became too painful to bear.  I convalesced for two weeks in Walla Walla, got driven back to Portland by a friend I'd made along the way, and flew back to my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, where I spent the winter in my parents' house while the house was being renovated.  For much of that time, the bedrooms were unusable, so I camped in our back yard.  When spring rolled around, I was feeling good enough to get back out west to continue my walk, but around Easter of 2008, my mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, or GBM—the most common and most aggressive form of brain cancer, which strikes about 10,000 Americans a year.  No one knows its cause, and there's no cure for GBM as of yet, but that's not for lack of trying:  scientists keep doing their research and testing, but the cancer is vicious, and it adapts to all treatment modalities.  So far, glioblastoma has proven to be a deadly, unsolvable riddle.  Mom died nine months after her diagnosis; the average life expectancy, post-diagnosis, is 11-13 months, i.e., about a year.  The five-year survival rate is around 3 percent.  Ted Kennedy and John McCain both died of GBM as well; neither lasted much beyond the above-mentioned statistical window, despite having access to the best of the best health care.  That's how ruthless GBM is.

So Kevin's Walk, the first of my walk blogs, went from being a chronicle of my Pacific Northwest walk to being a chronicle of Mom's sickness, decline, and death.  It took a long while to recover from Mom's passing, but time is a river that washes away the worst of the pain, and I got back on my feet eventually.  

Kevin's Walk 2 dealt with my 2017 walk—my first-ever trans-Korea trek.  I had friends who, behind the scenes, were doubtful I'd be able to do the walk ("It's been almost ten years... you're not a spring chicken anymore," said one of my closest friends), but I did it anyway, so fuck them.  Heh.  When I look back on how I blogged that walk, I'm not all that satisfied:  I want to go back and re-edit Kevin's Walk 2 to be more coherent.  The blog is full of short entries—photo dumps and random thoughts jotted while on the trail—and it's often hard to tell which thoughts and images belong to which day of walking.  By the time I was walking in 2019, I had settled on a blogging style that made more sense for the reader:  one blog post per day, on which would appear both the day's thoughts and the day's photos—all of them.  That proved to be a much better way of keeping records than the jumbled, haphazard, piecemeal blogging I'd done in 2017.  At some point, I'll go back to the 2017 blog and reorganize it into something coherent.

Kevin's Walk 3 dealt with my 2019 walk, just last year.  I had established a blogging rhythm and had gained a ton of experience from the 2017 walk; this meant I was more aware of the dos and don'ts of trans-Korea trekking.  I'm bizarrely proud of that blog and that whole hiking experience, and it was a good foundation for the walk I did this year.

Kevin's Walk 4, then, was a sort of culmination:  it represented the last time I'd be walking the Four Rivers path for a while:  there are many trails to hike, and I'm not getting any younger.  Overall, the walk this year proved magnificent, but it had some bad points:  a bitchy motel manager, for one thing, and a couple ill-advised shortcuts that involved fusing shorter segments of the walk into longer segments, resulting in significantly different routes and terrain, and the missing-out of some of the experience that had, previously, made the overall walk worthwhile (e.g., reaching the "700-li" rock that marks the official start of the Nakdong River portion of the trail... I missed that rock this year because of those damn shortcuts I'd tried, and I was rewarded with angry dogs and dangerous traffic instead).

So here we are, now, with Kevin's Walk 5.  The walk itself won't be until about October of 2021, so starting this blog now may seem premature.  But I'm starting the blog early, anyway, because there's a lot to plan:  this walk will take me along the Donghaean Gukto-jongju Jajeongeo-gil, i.e., the East Sea coastal bike path.  This is, from the research I've done, a very different beast from the Four Rivers path.  It's going to be windy, which means I might have to buy myself some sports goggles to keep the grit out of my eyes.  I've already plotted out about two-thirds of my total path down to Busan (see here), and one thing I've learned is that the motels I had relied on during my previous walks won't be around.  Instead, all the lodging along the coast appears to come in three major varieties:  minbak (stay in a family's home, in a rented-out bedroom), resort hotels, and pensions.  I'm trying to avoid minbak as much as possible, and resort hotels seem like a ridiculously expensive option, so that means pensions.  Thus far, I've managed to find a pension at every stopping point, which is good news.  Unfortunately, the certification-center chart that I'd been relying on ran out of trail about two-thirds of the way down the coast, so I now have to find a more complete, up-to-date chart that shows the rest of the certification centers all the way down to Busan.  At this point, I'm assuming that this trail's endpoint is the same as that of the Four Rivers trail, i.e., the Nakdong River Estuary Barrage, but I could be mistaken.  I'll tell you more when I find out more.

In the meantime, welcome to this newest walk blog!  I'm very much looking forward to walking a completely different trail.  Here's hoping 2021 proves to be a better year than 2020 has been.  The pandemic, and its accompanying restrictions, didn't affect my walk that much this year, but it has affected other, non-trekking-related aspects of my life.  I think we could all use a break from the constant oppression, yes?  A word of caution:  until next October, blogging here may be sporadic at best.  I'm going to try to do a reconnoiter of the first three legs of the east-coast trail in the week between Christmas and New Year's, but if the weather proves too shitty, I'll cancel and wait until the spring to do some exploring.  Feel free to leave comments, though; I'll be happy to hear your thoughts and to consider your travel wisdom.