I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. The great affair is to move.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Today belonged entirely to the road, and only a small part of it was on foot.
We landed in Madrid in the soft unreality of an overnight flight, and the airport did something we did not expect. The long corridor between terminals is glazed in panels of colored glass, magenta and citrus and a green like shallow sea, and the moving walkway pulls you through them while the morning light lays the colors across the floor. You glide through a kaleidoscope before you are properly awake and somehow being inside this color prism fills you with energy and brings you joy. Spain, it seemed, had decided to greet us the way a cathedral greets a pilgrim, in stained glass.
What followed was the small, unglamorous theater of deciphering a foreign country’s trains: Cercanías and Renfe, a free connecting ticket hidden inside the long-distance fare, signage between the metro and the rail lines, unclear exit signs, all of that felt designed to test one’s intelligence and resolve. We puzzled it out and there is a quiet pride in solving a transit system in a language you are still learning.
We surfaced at Plaza de Castilla, where the grand Castellana runs out of Madrid and the two leaning towers of the Puerta de Europa tip toward each other like a gate held open over the traffic.
And then the day’s first true discovery. Ten minutes from Chamartín station, in a shop so small that even three visitors make a crowd, the Vert y Frais proprietor serves tostadas and café with real heart. The tostadas with avocado and tomato and turkey on good bread, and the café con leche are made to order with a care you could taste. And you do not rush, you linger and absorb. The owner moves between languages and greets many who come in by name. It is the opposite of a tourist trap, worth a detour that is not in a guidebook. I sat with my coffee and my Spanish verbs, ser and estar, the two ways this language has of saying to be, one for what you are and one for where you are right now, and felt the trip’s small grammar settle into place.
The train north was clean and comfortable and, the first leg at least, exactly on time. The meseta opened outside the window, gold and wide.
At Palencia the layover was long enough to walk, and the town offered up its quiet architecture and, of all things, an art school with a mural of a hand and a paintbrush, a lovely thing to stumble upon. The connecting train was three quarters of an hour late, which I understand is ordinary once you leave the fast lines. Not an inconvenience but an opportunity to explore a town we were just passing through.
By evening we reached Astorga, where we bought our trekking poles for the weekend’s mountain hike and officially began our Camino by having our pilgrim credentials stamped at the Astorga Cathedral.
We toured the cathedral, a breathtaking work of art. Behind the altar rises a gilded retablo carved by Gaspar Becerra, a student of Michelangelo, its scenes so alive you want to stay and study each one in awe. Before we left, I lit a candle for the long lives of those we love.
Then we walked around the outside of Gaudí’s Episcopal Palace, a castle dreamed by a child or by a wizard with exquisite taste.
From the old walls the meseta rolled out toward tomorrow. I am a firm believer that beauty, of design, architecture, art or nature, lifts the human spirit perhaps far more than the daily bread does.
