91 Miles, Two Blistered Feet, and One Hell of a Birthday

United Kingdom  |  Hadrian's Wall National Trail, England  |  May 2017 

I will begin by telling you the trail song I wrote on day six of walking, because it tells you most of what you need to know about the experience:

"This is how we feel when we walk. Our feet are telling us to piss off! But we turn that frown around and tell them to pipe down. Cause this is how we feel when we walk."

And a verse for Jen: "Jen's heels are literally peeling off! But she fights back and gives that pain a smack."

And a verse for me: "Erin's knee ain't so pleased. But she limps on and keeps the medi's strong."

And a verse for Matt, who was largely fine the whole time and who we both resented appropriately: "Zippidy-do-da."

We walked Hadrian's Wall National Trail because I wanted to do “something significant” for my 39th birthday: 91 miles from the North Sea to the Irish Sea, coast to coast across England. Three of us: Matt, me, and our friend Jen. We flew overnight to Paris and then a puddle jumper to Newcastle, slept on the puddle jumper because we'd barely slept on the overnight, found a Starbucks in Paris during our layover, and arrived in Newcastle with somewhere between one and two hours of cumulative sleep feeling reasonably functional.

Hadrian's Wall dates to 122 AD. The Emperor Hadrian ordered it built to, and I'm quoting directly, "separate the Romans from the barbarians." It stretched coast to coast at its height, with turrets and small forts every mile. We were walking it east to west, which turns out to be the direction that ends with fifteen miles of urban pavement on an already-destroyed body, which is why most people walk west to east. We had not fully understood this until a British couple at breakfast one morning explained it kindly. We would not have changed our direction even if we had.

We wanted the experience of putting our feet in the sand on both coasts. So our first day, before the actual Wall trail, was a seven-mile warm-up walk from the beach at South Shields to Segedunum Fort at Wallsend, where the trail officially begins. The beach was reminiscent of Nantucket: sand hills, wooden fences, grasses, then rocky cliffs with remnants of a Roman fort at the water's edge. A rainstorm passed through in classic English style. We arrived at the fort, got our first trail passport stamp, and found our way to Colman's Fish and Chips across from our inn, which had some of the best fish and chips we've ever had. Then Newcastle Brown Ales at a pub nearby, because you cannot be in Newcastle without doing that. Beer was two-fifty to three-fifty a pint. A round for three of us was slightly more than the cost of one craft beer at home.

Day two was the first real day on the trail: seventeen miles to Heddon-on-Wall. About 95% of it was urban walking to get out of Newcastle, which was its own experience. In the first thirty minutes we saw a horse tied up in the middle of a neighborhood yard, a rat that was absolutely Scabbers from Harry Potter running ahead of us on the path, and a group of ten-year-old boys in school uniforms smoking in a school yard. One of them looked exactly like Neville Longbottom. We had walked through the heart of Newcastle along the River Tyne and its seven bridges, and then the urban landscape finally gave way to English countryside.

My shoes turned out to be wrong for this. I'd worn my hiking sneakers thinking the trail was flat and long. It is not flat. Multiple blisters had formed by midday. The lunch stop we'd been counting on, a place that was supposed to be good and also a brewery, turned out to be five hours into the walk rather than three, and the food was awful and the beer mediocre, but we trudged on.

Then the English countryside arrived properly: fields, flowers, farms, sheep being adorable and communicative in that specific sheep way where they all run toward the farmer at once and you can almost hear them saying "there he is, chow time." The four step trackers between the three of us were all disagreeing with the guidebook mileage in ways that turned out to be significant. Step trackers, we learned, measure steps, not geography. They had been lying to us about our fitness for years.

We reached Heddon-on-Wall and were told our inn was actually two miles farther. I shed a few tears at this information. I will not pretend otherwise. We walked the two miles. When the innkeeper opened the door and took one look at me she said I looked "shattered." I told her that was accurate. The pub in town served excellent food. I was asleep before I finished the blog post.

Day three brought hailstones while we were suited up in ponchos, which we took philosophically since we'd just put the ponchos on and at least they were getting used. The stiles multiplied throughout this section. Stiles are the gates and rock wall steps you climb over and through at every field boundary on the trail. They are everywhere. Jen, who is tall, became convinced they were built by giants based on the distance between each step.

My left knee announced itself on the downhills around midday. This is the knee that has given me trouble since childhood and had apparently decided that 13 miles of English farmland was the right time to revisit the issue. I took a lot of Aleve. We found two sections of Hadrian's Wall on this day and the age of it, standing right there alongside us, 2,000 years old, is the kind of thing you stop and just stand in front of for a minute.

The hardest section of the whole trail came next: nine miles but the biggest elevation changes we'd see. We started at Sycamore Gap, which you'd recognize from photographs or from Robin Hood with Kevin Costner, where the Wall dips dramatically and a single tree has grown at the lowest point. Beautiful. Then an extreme steep climb to the highest point on the entire trail, followed by a series of massive ups and downs, all following the wall as it runs over the hills. The wind was 30-40 miles per hour sustained, not gusting, just consistently blowing, which was actually helpful since the climbing had us working up a real sweat.

Looking back from the highest point at the wall going up and down over the hills into the distance, it genuinely looked like the Great Wall of China. I stood there and thought: good for Hadrian. He made something that lasts.

We got slightly lost and ended up at a farmhouse that was literally the only building for miles. A woman came out and told us we were off track and to cut through her barn to reconnect. Matt's highlight of the day was from the summit looking down at the highway below to see a string of MGs out for a Sunday drive, tiny and perfect in the best way.

Jen's heels were peeling off. This is not a metaphor. This is what happened. The skin on her heels was literally peeling away in sheets. It was shocking how fast it happened and it was genuinely very painful. A British man at breakfast the next morning who was also walking the trail, who had himself had to quit at Housesteads years earlier because of blisters and had been hearing about it from his friends ever since, gave us the biggest bandages we'd ever seen for Jen's heels. He was walking the trail solo for a second attempt to finish. He seemed more distressed by Jen's condition than by his own history with the trail.

We called a taxi from Housesteads to the inn rather than walk the last few miles. The taxi took about four minutes. With the continued ascents and descents it would have taken us two hours. There was no debate.

Day five was my birthday. We started with tea and scones at a shop that appeared at a fortunate moment during a trail diversion through a small flooded town, and Matt found a giant slide in a playground along the detour and used it. Then a bathroom appeared just when we all needed one, which felt like a birthday miracle.

The B&B that night was at Lanercost Priory, right on the property of a twelfth-century monastery that William Wallace ransacked and where King Edward I stayed while ill, eventually dying in a nearby town. The owner is a chef who used to run a hotel in Scotland and offered a three-course farm-to-table dinner for guests: Parmesan egg souffle with a runny yolk, grilled chicken with mushroom sauce and sauteed cabbage and potato and sea beans, and a traditional pudding with warm red currant topping. It was a genuinely wonderful meal. The owner who served it lingered at the table extensively in the way that hosts sometimes do when they want to be appreciated for longer than you have energy for at 9pm, but his stories were genuinely interesting so we forgave him.

When I came back to the room after checking in, there was a birthday cake with lit candles waiting for me. The owners had organized it. A lemon ginger pound cake. I got a little emotional. I had wanted a birthday that pushed and challenged me and this one had done that comprehensively.

Day six was fourteen miles to Carlisle. Flat farmland, warm day, the last of the interesting landscapes behind us. Long. We made up trail songs. We stopped at an "Honestly Box," which is a small roadside installation with drinks and snacks on the honor system for walkers, put out by someone in retirement to make a little extra money and do something kind. That cold water and candy bar on mile nine were genuinely important to me.

We passed other walkers in Carlisle who recognized us as having come from the east and shouted "You made it!" with raised fists. We looked, apparently, like people who had survived something. We had pizza at an eclectic hipster restaurant in the city and then sat there like zombies yawning at the table, surrounded by the bars and shops of an actually quite cool small English city that we were too broken to enjoy.

The last day was fourteen more miles. I switched to my Allbirds for the opening pavement section and I am endorsing those shoes publicly and without reservation: they are not hiking shoes but they are the most comfortable shoes I own and they got me through the final miles of England when nothing else would have.

The trail icon is an acorn and through the city diversion we hunted them on poles and bike racks and signs, keeping ourselves on course. An older man pulled over in his car to offer directions through a flooding diversion, just because we looked like we needed help.

The marshlands section was about three miles alongside a highway and felt three times that long in the heat. An ice cream bar at a small rest stop four miles from the end was possibly the best ice cream I've ever eaten. We took a wrong turn leaving and added a third of a mile. This was not a good moment.

One mile from Bowness-on-Solway, a retired man had made a sign and set it up to guide walkers through the last stretch and make himself a little extra income in the process. He was delightful and gave us the exact play-by-play of the last mile. I moved faster in that final mile than I had in two days.

Then we saw the sign for the trail end. Six hundred meters. Then the Irish Sea appeared.

We all took turns pressing our final passport stamp at the end marker. 91 miles. North Sea to Irish Sea. Coast to coast across England.

Would we do it again? I've thought about this. The honest answer is: yes, but differently. Would we do the full thing start to finish? No. We don't need the completion bragging rights. What we'd do is the highlights: Heddon-on-Wall to Greenhead over four or five days, the sections with the wall itself and the elevation and the big views, and maybe a rest day in the middle. The miles of urban pavement at either end are just miles of urban pavement. Much of the trail you are walking to finish it rather than for the trail itself.

But I don't regret a single step. And that's why we travel