I found the Pilgrim’s Home this morning in Santiago and made a donativo of my hiking poles for another pilgrim who might need them. Told them the brief story of how I came to have them and they were appreciative of the donation.

Victoria went to the shopping neighborhood nearby. Our clothes from yesterday’s deluge have dried out except for our shoes, which will take a few days.

I booked an English-language tour of the Cathedral at 5:00. It is one of the most important cathedrals in the Catholic World, after Jerusalem and Rome.

We’ll go pick up our rental car this afternoon. Taking a taxi to the airport and picking up the car will be straightforward, but navigating the labyrinthine parking situation in Santiago is likely to be a challenge. Just need to cross off one challenge at a time.

Victoria has been pressing me for my reasons for visiting Father Vicente tomorrow, since it will now require a bit more effort than I had anticipated. I don’t have a succinct answer. It’s not as though I’m trying to revisit a time in my younger life that I miss today. It was in fact an amazing time in my life, but not as amazing as now!

I think it is just a simple matter of returning a small kindness that someone one showed to me. It was extraordinary of Don Vicente to invite 4 near-strangers into his home in 1989, show us how to cook tortilla Española, and practice his English (primarily with me, since all of the others were fluent in Spanish).

I brought him a bar of Galician chocolate, since he spent his whole life here and now lives in neighboring Pulga.

We took at taxi to the airport to pick up the rental car. Driving in the area around Santiago was a little bewildering, with multiple roundabouts, etc. But we conquered the logistical challenge of finding parking not too far from our hotel.

In the afternoon we had a tour of the cathedral and surrounding area with a wonder English-speaking Galician guide named Begoña. As one of the most important cathedrals in the Catholic world, Santiago has a wealth of history, intrigue, and mysteries dating back to the 9th century.

I told Begoña that Victoria and I had been raised in the Christian tradition, but not the Catholic tradition. At first she seemed not to understand how this was possible. Then, she said, “oh, you know the Bible, but not the saints!” Exactly.

Begoña suggested that they might be deploying the botafumeiro in the Cathedral after the 7:00 pilgrims’ mass. They only do this a few times a year, so it is kind of a big deal.

Unlike many peregrinos I’d met, I had yet to attend a single pilgrims’ mass. So I took a chance.

It is a lucky pilgrim indeed who gets to see the botafumeiro in action, and it was amazing. At the end of the mass, 6 or 8 monks in red robes hold onto the ends of a long rope and swing the huge censor back and forth across the transept over the heads of the packed pews.

The tradition started in the Middle Ages, when dirty, sick, and exhausted pilgrims gathered in the upper galleries to rest. The incense was thought to have health benefits, not to mention improving the smell. Napoleon absconded with the original one during the French occupation, but the one in use is an exact replica.

We ended the day with a delicious meal at the Parador. Victoria and I shared a local cheese ice cream with hazelnuts and blueberries— very Galician!