Camino de Santiago

I am in a courtyard restaurant in Sarria, at a long table with a man from Argentina and eight women from all over the world. We are drinking Rioja and talking about how much we love Wikipedia, we are talking about the gorillas in Rwanda’s mountains, we are talking about God. It is Sunday. We are 111km from Santiago de Compostela. We will walk for six days along the Camino Frances to the Cathedral. One woman says that people have been walking this way since Before Christ (BC). The paths run over ley lines, following old Roman trade routes, at night the milky way lights up and points the way. Apparently, the Spanish call the Milky Way el Camino de Santiago. In Medieval times, they thought the stars were made by the dust kicked up by the pilgrims as they passed through. Back before Columbus sailed over the Atlantic, back when the world was flat, they thought this edge of Galicia was the furthest West it was possible to go. People walked this way thinking they were walking to the end of…