Travel takes a little bit of madness. You pay a fair chunk of money to be up for twenty-four hours to get to somewhere to disrupt sleep patterns, eat strange foods (or at least familiar foods prepared in strange ways), make your feet and other body parts hurt with exertion, encounter strange languages like Scottish and North Lancastrian, and generally put yourself out there into unknown situations. And a little madness sometimes leads to bizarre things, like letting Dubbs be in charge.

We were driving from Keswick to Lincoln, where Dubbs and Candice are working on their master’s degrees, which is a little over three hours away. But Dubbs wanted to see Hadrian’s Wall, which adds about eighty minutes to the trip. But a) we’re all nerds and like old things, and b) we knew we’d spend more than eighty minutes on the site. So off we went, getting to Housesteads Fort along part of the wall.

Dubbs picked that part of the wall because of the fort (the foundations and some of the walls of the fort are in excellent condition), but also because it has a small section of Hadrian’s Wall on which you can (legally) walk. And so we churned our way the half mile from the parking lot to the museum and fort, mostly uphill (it seems the Romans wanted to put a wall and fort at the top of a hill), with a temperature of fifty and in winds gusting over thirty miles per hour in spitting rain. I was pleased to be wearing every jacket I brought, for a total of four layers.

The fort remains varied from being roughly ground-level to being about four feet high, and there were information placards all over the site. We started by going around the entire outside of the fort, climbing to the top of the hill where the fort and Hadrian’s Wall met, and then we went down along the wall, through a gate, and back up the other side of the fort, all in varying degrees of rain. Once we got to the front of the fort and entered it, the rain ended, although the wind kept us company.

Dubbs called Rome “the original franchise” because the Romans standardized so many things. The Roman fort was based on one design, which was adapted for local topography. It had four gates, which had roads that led to the main administrative center of the fort. There was one large (and heated) house for the commander and barracks for the eight hundred men who manned the fort. The men slept eight to a room in cramped quarters. There were some buildings right outside the fort for tradespeople and some families of the soldiers. This particular fort was in use for over three hundred years (from about 100 to about 400).

We wandered all over the site learning these things, and Meredith asked the ticket taker where we could walk the wall. She indicated up the hill to where we had started our tour. I had seen the wall and wondered about it, but Dubbs had protested that the sign at the top of the hill indicated that the wall trail went down along the fort and not back along the wall. I imagine the sign makers from thirty years ago:

John: Hey, Bob. I finished the sign for the wall trail going this way. Should I put the other sign up for the wall walk?
Bob: Eh. It’s a wall, and you can walk on it. It seems pretty evident to me. Besides, the match is on the telly at the pub in twenty minutes, and it’s raining and windy. I say we leave it.

At any rate, we went back up the hill and walked the half mile or so of wall that could be hiked. The views were spectacular and the drop-off on the Scottish side was dizzying in places. We came back along the normal footpath next to the wall.

We explored the small museum, and then went back to the car park area and had lunch at the cafe. All told, we were on site for over three hours. It was a good time.

The three hours to Lincoln were uneventful, but the end was a bit tough – I had to drive through parts of the medieval town center, and that was stressful. We dropped Dubbs and Candice off at the university about a mile outside the center (or centre) and drove back to our hotel, where Mer and I got situated.

So it was we finally went out to wander the small town center about 7:30. We stumbled across some spectacular views of the cathedral and some of the original wall. We ate supper at a pub, and even found some Roman ruins of the eastern gate on the way back to the hotel. That was a good warmup for All Things Roman in Lincoln for tomorrow, because Dubbs is still in charge.