We completed the five-day Camino de Santiago pilgrimage yesterday, and celebrated by having dinner twice in about five hours. Walking 13 or 14 miles a day is enough to work up an appetite that can be acknowledged without fear of gaining weight. So there is that. Thinking back, I failed to mention, over the past […]

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*By “triumphal” we mean stumbling past the sign that read “Santiago”. So, Day 5 of the Camino de Santiago, the condensed, 73-mile version of a pilgrimage that can be 10 times as long, for the minority who start walking in distant lands, and often is about six times as long when starting just north of […]

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The Camino de Santiago is a public event that passes through some of the most remote parts of Spain. The miracle is that the pilgrimage is so little touched by crime, especially given the surge in participation over the past 20 years, crossing the 275,000 mark in 2016, with women making up almost half of […]

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If Day 1 of our Camino de Santiago was about getting to the other end, Day 2 was about getting comfortable among the other pilgrims. It is a diverse group. Statistics compiled by church officials in Santiago de Compostela, in northwest Spain, suggest half the pilgrims are not Spanish … that Germans are the biggest […]

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(Above, clockwise from top: Admiring a huge and ancient tree; distance markers scrawled on a bench; the official markers, noting correct direction and kilometers left before Santiago; Taking a break in a farmer’s outbuilding. The sign hanging, above, invites pilgrims to rest as long as they keep the area clean and tidy.) This may be […]

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Tomorrow morning, the three of us begin our walk on the Camino de Santiago — the best-known of the Christian pilgrimage trails to Santiago de Compostela, a cathedral city in northwestern Spain. At the moment, we are in a bustling little town named Sarria, 110 kilometers (68 miles) east of Santiago. Sarria is the handiest […]

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I can attest to the obvious: A day and a half in Madrid is not nearly enough to get any nuanced sense of Spain’s capital city. We could have done better. I never have arrived at one of the world’s great cities having done so little preparation. Not much studying of maps or prominent sights, […]

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We spent a weekend in San Diego last month, and we did a 45-minute walk one day, and then a three-hour hike up and down a 2,700-foot mountain … and we felt like slugs. In San Diego, exercising is not part of a lifestyle, it is a lifestyle all on its own. You get fit, […]

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If a person has a chance to go aboard an aircraft carrier, he or she pretty much has to go. For a long time “aircraft carrier” was a byword for enormous. Both in size and in military impact. The seagoing aircraft carrier retains its ability to project power but it has lost its monopoly on […]

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Summer smog? That’s nothing. Risk of the Big One earthquake? No matter. Thousands of arriving foreign tourists exposed to the chaos of the Tom Bradley Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport? That’s a daily killer to La-La Land’s reputation. Take, for example, a Monday afternoon in mid-January.

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