There are trips you take to see things. And there are trips you take to understand something — about yourself, about what you want, about what's left when you remove the calendar, the responsibilities and the habits of thirty years. The Camino de Santiago belongs to the second category. It's not a tourist trip. It's not a sports hike, even if the blisters and the knee pain are very real. It's a walking journey of several weeks across Spain, alone or with strangers who become something else as the stages go by, toward a cathedral in the northwestern corner of the European continent — and what happens during this trip isn't what you'd planned.