Day 22, off to Sangju City

My bus to Sangju City leaves in three hours. There's not much for me to do, prep-wise, except refill my backpack (which is mostly prepped already), putter around the apartment a bit, do final checks, then skip off to the Express Bus Terminal to catch my ride out. Once I arrive, it's a 10.5K walk to my first motel. A lot of that walk is not really along the Nakdong River, but it'll be All River All the Time for the three days that follow. Day 2 is 25K; Day 3 is only 20K; Day 4, the final leg, is 33K plus some extra as I walk from the dam to my lodgings across town (I might also try to get a glimpse of the huge Andong Lake that lies just beyond the dam). Given that I'll be arriving in Sangju around 7 p.m., I don't expect that I'll have a post for you until 10 p.m. at the earliest, but I'm thinking I won't be posting until close to midnight.

Temps in Andong, for the next few days, look to be warm during the day (22ºC/72ºF) and very cool at night (7ºC/45ºF). Except for tonight's walk, I'll be walking from early morning to early afternoon, so nighttime temps aren't too much of a concern, although it might be pretty cool before sunrise every morning. After sunrise, the earth doesn't take much time to warm up if it's a sunny day (but Friday the 21st is supposed to be cloudy). I'm taking an extra sleeveless shirt along with me to stick under my tee shirt as an extra layer if necessary, and I've still got my rain jacket with me; it's useless for rain (I apparently need to re-spray it with waterproofing material), but it's a good windbreaker that keeps your body heat close to you.

Sangju is actually pretty close to the geographic center of South Korea—just a wee bit southeast of center. On the Four Rivers trail, the city marks the point where you finish the Saejae portion and start the fourth and final Nakdong River portion of the trail that leads you down to Busan. But this is not the start of the Nakdong River: if you follow the river in the opposite direction, away from Busan, you head toward Andong, with its dam and lake. Incredibly, Andong Lake is also not the source of the Nakdong River: on a map, you can follow the Nakdong out the "back" of the lake, where it snakes northward and starts splitting up. I'm honestly not sure where the Nakdong's source really is (or if it even has one single source).

So I'll talk to you tonight, then. Cheers!