84 Miles of History

Training notes: 8019 steps today, made all the sweeter by the fact that two of my walks were in really awful weather. I wanted to stay inside, but hey - I'm planning a walk in the borderlands! Weather may not be fabulous all the time. So I look at it as good experience. Need to up the step number. Tomorrow I shoot for 8500. A small goal, but a goal.

Travel notes: I note from the Hadrian's Wall Path website that the entire path is 84 miles long. It sounded like a decently long walk and I guess that it still is. Then again, I watched "The Way" last night and after doing a bit of reading I find that the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela is about 485 miles. So comparatively speaking, my trip is a walk in the park (which it literally is as parts of it cross through the Northumberland National Park).

While people have been making the pilgrimage for hundreds, if not thousands, of years; my path was opened in 2003. Why all the comparisons? I'm not sure. I suppose that I am wondering why any of us choose to undertake long walks. Do we have some hard wiring that makes us want to journey? I think maybe we do. As my brother Erik has often said, there is a wanderlust that allowed us to spread out across the globe.

So is this trip a pilgrimage for me? I think in a way it is. I love history. I love travel. I am attracted to the idea of walking across the island that is the UK. Maybe it is a way to feel like I am not yet old. Then again, I am pretty sure that when I am 70 (which is still a couple of decades away) I will be planning my next walking trip. Or at the very least, my next trip. Just because I can. Just to do it.

The reality, the heart of the matter I think, is that I feel we are overly programmed to stay on the road. Color within the lines. We see our world from windows - from a car, a train, a bus, a plane. I was always the kid who looked out the window at those mysterious side roads that wound their way off the freeway or the highway and wondered what was there, where they led to. In my travels I am often sidetracked by the side roads. It doesn't matter where I am, I am always looking down the road and wondering what's that way.

It's been a wonderful obsession, I have found some really cool stuff. A side road in Lyon led to a great little eatery. A side road in London led to bookstore that was incredible (I tried to find it again, to no avail). A side road in Dubrovnik led to a posh bar with the best mojito I have ever had; and in Sarajevo it led to a nightclub in a basement with rock walls (literally, a basement that seemed carved out of the rock around it) where we drank too many gin and tonics and danced like no one was looking.

Yes, it is a path. But it is a path that is without cars, where the only traffic is other walkers, some sheep and maybe a cow or two. It is walking a path that was patrolled by Roman soldiers. A chance to see something without a pane of glass between me and it. To be able to literally touch history, to have that wonderful sensation of the weight of history washing over you; to be awash in it.

And there, right there in that last sentence is the answer to the question. This is a pilgrimage. An unorthodox one, perhaps. but I am compelled to do it. That alone rocks me back on my heels a bit.