That was tough

 It took us a long time to finally do the second leg of the shvil. Between vacations, work and covid, we had a lot of difficulty finding a Friday that would work for all of us. We found one though and decided that this time we were going to get an earlier start. The problem is that we aren’t following anyone’s hike exactly so we’re trying to figure this out on our own. We knew that we were starting at metzudat Yesha, where we left off last time and we knew there was parking there. The question was where we would end. I looked for a few places and finally settled on kever Yeshayahu. I wasn’t sure there was parking there but it was right on the trail and next to a road so I hoped there was parking or we’d have to look for parking along the way. Google Maps said if we walk along the trail it would be 22.8 km which seemed do-able. 

Our plan was to meet at kever Yeshayahu a little before 6 and daven there and then drive together to the starting point. We left our house at 3:50 and the Seiferas’ left about a half hour earlier and we were right on target. We got there, davened and drove. Then we hit our first snag… we couldn’t figure out where we should go. I think we wasted at least fifteen minutes trying to get that but we got it and we were off a little after 7 AM. Google maps said it should take 5 hours. I couldn’t imagine it would take us more than 6 so we’d finish by 1 and all would be good. We were having a lot of company for lunch the Seiferas’ were having a ton of people for dinner. Even though we had all basically finished cooking, we still wanted to finish by 1 so we could be home around 4. 

The beginning of the hike was very hard. The paths were very rocky, through bushes and stuff with a lot of steep hills going up and down. A couple times we walked a little bit past the path and circled back but didn’t waste too much time doing that. At one point, we couldn’t find how to get to the continuation of the path. We saw where it was but there was a gate and we couldn’t figure out how to get to it. After a while, we found a way and continued. I slipped on one of the declines but I just scraped my leg a little and was fine. Overall, the first couple hours were hard but it wasn’t too hot yet and we felt that we were doing well.

We could see on the map that shvil yisrael goes in a circular path when walking straight would have been much faster. We are following the shvil and not cheating so we did that. 

It would have been much closer and easier to follow the red line straight across instead of going south and north but we’re not cheaters so we stayed on the path. Around the time we got to the top of that bend and we were back near the highway, we decided we should when google maps thought that we’d get there. It was probably around 11 and I thought we had two hours left in the hike. We were very disappointed when it said we still had almost three hours left! That meant that we had only completed about 40% of the hike and it had already taken us almost 4 hours. We started talking about possibly taking a cab to the car and continuing next time. Ultimately we decided that if picked up our pace a little we could make it to the car by 2 and still be home by 5 which would give us enough time. 

To give some background: when Shira and I walk quickly without a stroller and without stopping, we do about 7000 steps in an hour. 1000 steps is approximately .75 km. These are our steps per hour for the hike:

7 – 4700

8 – 4000

9 – 5200

10 – 5200

11 – 4600

12 – 5300

1 - 5300 

You can see that the second hour was extremely challenging. Despite the fact that we were exhausted in the last two hours, we really picked up our pace and covered a lot of ground.

Thank God, the rest of the hike was relatively easy and we got to the car a little after 2. We were all (though I admit that I was probably a little worse than the others) completely exhausted when we climbed into our car. We drove back to the starting point so the Seiferas could get their car and got home about two hours before Shabbat started. 

The hike took us about seven hours total and we ended up walking at least 25 km. We didn’t see a single soul walking anywhere along the hike. We only saw one person the entire time and he was on a tractor. We did see a lot of cows and hyrax though. 

Gershon suggested that next time we get started even earlier and we limit it to about 15km. I agree. Hopefully next time will be in just a couple weeks.