“Remember, remember the 5th of November” goes the rhyme about Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up the English Houses of Parliament – no need to today, of course, Brexit is doing it for us…
But in 2018 it is also the day we started on the next three stages of the INT.
I arrived in Israel only yesterday evening, but at 4.30am I was up to again meet Rafi at Ronnie’s Pardes Hannah home at 6:00am this morning. By 7:30am we were at Rosh Pina for breakfast and planning the day. We decided to stretch ourselves and complete the unfinished stretch to Yesha Fort as well as the Day 4 stretch to Dishon – over 20km in all.
We started a little before 9:00am (after our usual car dance, leaving a car at Alma bridge 
before driving North to where we last stopped in July) and reached Yesha Fort a little before 11.00am, walking as before with spectacular views over the Hula valley. The morning weather was sunny but in the low 20s (or less) – perfect walking weather.
Yesha Fort, or the Nabi Yusha fort, renamed Metzudat Koach (Hebrew: מצודת כ”ח), is a police fort (one of the Taggart forts) built by the British Mandate administration during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine and currently used by the Israel Border Police. The site around the fort contains a stone monument and a new museum (founded in 2014), together constituting 
the Metzudat Koach Memorial, which commemorates 28 Israeli soldiers who died during the 1948 conquest of the strategically important fort. The fort and observation point is located in the Upper Galilee, close to an abandoned Shia shrine of Nabi Yusha (“Prophet Joshua“).[4] The Hebrew word “ko’ach” (כח) has a double meaning: as a common noun it means “strength”, while its numerical value according to gematria is 28, the number of the fallen soldiers.
By 11.00am, after paying our respects to the 28 young men – almost all aged between 17 and 19 years old – who died seizing Yesha fort in the War of Independence, we were on our way to Dishon. We passed Nabi Yusha
and made good progress as the weather clouded over but the rain held off as we stopped for lunch at the top of Keren Naftali. The views to our left over the Hula wetlands and Lake Agamon crowded with migrating birds remained magnificent. We then walked down towards the Dishon valley under greying skies and we started to get occasional threats of rain, and flurries of light showers by the time we were walking up the Dishon stream towards where we had left the car. The afternoon was muted – the land was agricultural, mainly cows and the occasional vineyards – but the views of the Hula faded to our left and there was less of historic interest to see.
Perhaps most notable were the huge numbers of 
Irises starting to appear across the entire landscape, and the occasional autumn crocus that were scattered across the ground and often pocked up in the middle of the trail. I look forward to seeing the irises in heir full glory in the spring!
We also came across two foxes – one shortly before the entering the Dishon valley and the other as we arrived at 
the car we had left at Gesher Alma, just below Dishon. But, overall, the afternoon lacked interest compared to what had gone before, and it was raining by the time we reached the car.
Our spirits were though raised by the very pleasant hotel, a very hot bath and a great informal dinner a Ha’Ari 8. The walk there and back through the old city, that Ronnie had not visited before, gave a taste of the special peace you find in Safed.
Hiking the Israel National Trail 