I remember arriving in Santiago de Compostela, the great Spanish pilgrimage city, on a cool, misty, Galician morning. It was that blue pre-dawn hour when anyone with a bit of common sense is curled up beside a pretty Spanish girl, not tramping around with an oversized backpack, looking for their hostel. I had arrived by train, from Madrid - hardly the arduous, soul-sapping slog across 800 miles of French and Spanish countryside that constitute the famous camino del Santiago. In the plazas, already bracing for the day’s traffic, they were setting up their souvenir stalls: the plastic rosaries and wooden crosses, the pocket-sized icons of Jesus and St. James. In the morning, with the sun lighting the flagstones outside the cathedral, I watched those road-weary pilgrims trudging across the plaza, their legs spattered with mud, their
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