In which strangers from Seattle capture a wonderful image

Several years on, I’m able to appreciate all the more the picture taken by one Marina, of Seattle. She was in Spain with her husband. They’d just traveled the Camino de Santiago themselves, by car. Seeing our little family’s dramatic entrance into the square, along with the celebrations of so many others around us, one of them told us, “We kinda wish we’d walked it too.” The background to this wonderfully captured moment begins below the image.

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The backstory from the blog entry from October 27, 2011:

The Cathedral, and a Sort of Finish Line

The cathedral seems situated for maximum impact.  You see only spires as you approach, and then the back and side.  Then you go through a stone archway into the plaza and face the building opposite the cathedral.  And once we entered the plaza of the cathedral, I focused on watching, and filming, Mom walking ahead of me.  I surprised myself by getting a little choked up, but I’m pretty sure it was because I forgot to take my meds.

“Oh, we’re here!” she said.

“You made it!” I told her.  “You did it.”

I handed Carrie the camera and hauled my backpack over to Mom.  I set it down and extracted the two battered red carnations I’d stored in it since the night before, and when she saw them she started crying again.  She didn’t even care that the stem of one was now only eight inches long.  When I pulled out the sixteen inches of the rest of the stem, she reached for that too.

Marina’s Perspective

Screen Shot 2015-11-28 at 8.16.36 PMAfter I reached out, on the four-year anniversary, of the picture, our photographer, Marina, took up the story.

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Read the original blog entry on our arrival before the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.

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