Hadrian Wall Path — July 2022

After three years in the making, we started the Hadrian Wall Path walk today. Three years because Covid-19 ruined our summer 2020 plans, and in 2021 the outbreak was still going strong. It wasn’t much easier in summer 2022 when a series of flight cancelations put at risk the walk, but eventually all of us made it from Tel Aviv to Carlisle by air, by train, by car, thru Brussels, London, Frankfurt and Helsinki.

Here’s one example: Arie was on the flight from Tel Aviv to Manchester thru Munich on Wednesday. That flight was canceled after 3 hours on the tarmac because of a computer malfunction. Must be an Apple computer. After a long hour on the phone with Lufthansa he was put on a flight the next morning from Tel Aviv to Manchester thru Frankfurt. While he was en route from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt, his connection flight to Manchester was canceled, and he was re-routed to fly the next morning from Frankfurt to Manchester thru Helsinki. You have to look at a map to understand how ridiculous this is. He made it to Manchester on Friday evening.

But we are here for the walk. All 19 hikers of us.

The Hadrian Wall was built 1900 years ago, around 122 AD, by the Roman Emperor Hadrian (Adrianus), to protect the Roman outpost of Brittania from the tribes in the north. Is was one of the first stone-built walls in Britain. The wall was 117km long from the Irish Sea to the North sea. Some remains of the walls are still around, and the Hadrian Wall path, which is about 140km long, traverses the wall remains where they exist, and roughly follows it elsewhere.