Leaving Galicia

I've been hogging the computer recently, because it's crunch time on this article. If I don't finish it before visiting season starts, I'll never get around to it. And so, my procrastination has started in earnest, and in breaks between games of Computer Chess and cups of coffee I've been littering the house with marked up copies of this darn thing. (I'm not sure if I mentioned that on the spur of the moment--horse metaphor!--I made us buy a printer in Puebla. I haven't owned a working printer in seven years, but we just carted one across Spain.)
Before heading off, we paid our respects to Saint James at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The line seemed strangely long, but everywhere we went in Galicia, we had seen pilgrims headed toward the church, so we didn't make too much of it. The Cathedral of St. James in Santiago is the third-most important pilgrimage site in Christendom, and since the twelfth-century it has received all the faithful who thought Rome or Jerusalem were a bit too far a hike.
it wasn't until we got inside that we realized that we had spent an hour or so waiting to embrace St. James himself, or at least the statue of him. And the ladies in front of us had brought a priest with them, so we got to hear a Spanish prayer before his bones. We sidled out and found an entrance that required less kneeling and saint-hugging.
After saying goodbye to our friends in Puebla, we made the Galician pilgrimage we had been looking forward to, heading to the capital, A Coruña (or La Coruña, or, in 16th-century England, The Groyne), to eat with John Barlow, who wrote the definitive guide to Galician food. Besides John, A Coruña has two claims to fame:a working Roman lighthouse and repelling a raid by Sir Francis Drake around the turn of the seventeenth century. Best I can tell, they're equally proud of the two: I was irked that everywhere I looked there was a monument to this early modern skirmish. No mention of the Spanish armada, incidentally. Somehow that seems less important on this side of the ocean.
John showed us around and took us to some number of the best local places. Ana should really write about this night; I was trying to go drink for drink with a British food-writer. I do remember hearing a jazz trombone solo in a smoky club full of musicians.
There is more to write, but I don't want to relive the next day's hangover or the twelve-hour train ride of the day after that.

Happy belated fourth of July to everyone over there. Ana and I celebrated in the traditional manner: with two glasses of cava in a Basque pub.