What’s Next ? Homeward Bound

“Bright young sun, it looks like the morning's come

And it's all come so easy like the heavens are wishing me well

And those dawning eyes brought forth my own sunrise

Well it's been a long time since the beat of my heart was a friend

Oh well, It's been a long time since I felt I was breathing again”

 

Roo Panes, Home from Home

 

A Mistake En Route

 

Having now completed Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, the Pennine Way, West Highland Way, Great Glen Way and finally Hadrian’s Wall Path, we are utterly exhausted... and admittedly a great deal thinner than when we began.  Ultimately, it was too long a stretch completed in too short a time to be fully appreciated while on the trail.  Each trail – especially the final three- deserved more space and time than we were able or willing to give them.  Each landscape, community, and regional history asked for attention, but by the end, we were moving more by momentum and routine than out of curiosity or the ability to reflect on the experiences at hand.  All of which was the result of the schedule we had set for ourselves and partially out of the difficulty of stopping once the routines of long-distance walking had taken hold. 

 

Looking back, we would not have tried to do quite so much in one stretch. We would have taken more rest days, allowed more space between trails, and lingered longer in the places that deserved it. At the time, however, there was always another path ahead, another train to catch, another reservation to make, and another section of the map waiting to be crossed.  Ultimately, doing this collection of trails properly would have meant not hiking along Hadrian’s Wall Path – but would have given us more time to better appreciate where we were.

 

 Hiking National Trails across the United Kingdom

 

Setting out to trek across the UK almost 50 days ago, we began with Wainwright’s Coast to Coast – setting out with excitement and curiosity, though both were quickly tempered by topography, rain, and gear challenges. It was also slightly surreal. We had set out expecting an immersion in northern England, only to find ourselves surrounded by so many Canadians and American hikers that, at times, we could almost have been back on the Bruce Trail or the Trans Canada Trail. In that sense, it reminded us a little of arriving on the Camino Francés expecting one kind of cultural experience, only to discover that long-distance trails create their own communities. Even so, the Coast to Coast served as our introduction to walking across Britain - a ramble through beautiful, difficult, varied landscapes that reminded us how quickly enthusiasm can be humbled and worn down by weather and terrain.

The Pennine Way was different. It felt less like an introduction and more like a continued test of endurance. There was beauty there, and wildness, and long stretches of time in nature, but there was also the growing awareness that we may have taken on more than we could reasonably absorb in one journey (let alone back to back with the C2C). That feeling was not helped by the technological failures that followed, which meant that most of the experience was lost or fractured in ways we had not expected.

 

The West Highland Way brought us into Scotland, but also into the realities of mass tourism, crowded trails, and a different hiking culture than the one we are often drawn toward. It was beautiful, certainly, but it was also busy in a way that changed how we experienced the route. Though we admit that these insights might well be partially shaped by coming at the end of almost a month of hiking.

 

Next, the Great Glen Way carried us onward through a landscape shaped by geology, canals, lochs, forestry, and human engineering, though by that point our impressions were increasingly filtered through deep exhaustion, constant reroutes, and long deforested tracks.

Finally came Hadrian’s Wall Path.

 

Of all the routes, Hadrian’s Wall may have suffered most from the way we approached it. The history along it is immense, layered, and wonderful to explore.  The landscape en route was beautiful – even through the rain.  Roman frontier, Victorian industrialization, rural England, modern roads, national trail infrastructure, tourism, agriculture, and memory all sat on top of one another. Yet we moved too quickly through it. We covered the miles across long days, but more often missed the point. We passed forts, milecastles, museums, ruins, villages, and stretches of wall that deserved more time than we could offer. 

That is perhaps the lesson Hadrian’s Wall left us with most clearly. Endurance is useful, but it is not the same thing as attention. Being able to keep walking does not mean that one is still fully present to what the walking offers.  This is why we have come to see that while we completed the entirety of Hadrian’s Wall Path, we, in fact, failed in exploring and living the route.

 

Homeward Bound

 

With Hadrian’s Wall behind us, our hiking in the UK has come to an end. Our journey home, however, is still to come.  Just as we reached England and Scotland through a long series of voyages, we now need to reverse the process. Not by foot this time, but by ship, rail, and the corridors of transit that have so often carried us between one walking route and the next.

 

After returning to Southampton for one final evening in the UK, we will once again board Queen Mary 2. This time, however, we will be sailing westbound across the Atlantic from Southampton to New York. From there, we will board an Amtrak train north and make our way back toward Toronto and Canada. A day later, we will step back onto an old friend of ours, VIA Rail’s The Canadian, for the long journey from Toronto to Vancouver.

Put another way, although the walking has stopped for now, we are still nearly two weeks away from home on the west coast of Canada.

 

There is something fitting in that. After more than a month spent following ancient roads, national trails, military frontiers, railway paths, canals, glens, and coast-to-coast routes, we will now return by other lines of movement. Trails will give way to train tracks. Footpaths will give way to ocean lanes. The rhythm of walking will be replaced by the roll of a ship and the long steel arc of rail across a continent.

 

Even then, the pause will be brief – and we admit it is something that we worry about at this moment.

 

Return to the Trans Canada Trail

Once back, there will be only a handful of days for rest, recovery, and resupply before we shoulder our packs once more and return to the Trans Canada Trail. After four years and roughly 14,000 kilometres of hiking from the Atlantic to the Pacific, this year marks a turning northward with “only” 3500-3800 (or so) kilometres left to go to the Arctic Ocean – a distance that feels both immense and strangely small compared to all that has already come before.

This year, our goal is to walk from Fort Saskatchewan to Whitehorse - pushing as far north as the season, weather, wildfires, and our bodies allow before winter inevitably closes in across the north.

For us, this year, the walking never really ends.  The compass simply seems to point us in the next direction, and, as always, we follow.

See you on the Trail