<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><FONT SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Palatino Linotype" LANG="0">Hello,<BR>
I am sorry that my efforts to "attach" the one pilgrims' editorial on the July 5 issue of TIME failed. Surely it is obvious that I'm not at all proficient in the use of computers, etc.<BR>
So..... here goes:<BR>
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TO OUR READERS<BR>
<BR>
Our Pilgrims. Progress<BR>
<BR>
On his way back down from the summit of Mont Blanc, Paris Bureau Chief James Graff met a woman on her way up. Graff was blistered and bruised from one of the hardest things he'd ever done (that's him on the cover of this magazine), but Catherine Rougerie left him thunderstruck. She is blind, and was being guided to the top of Western Europe's highest peak by a rope, tied to a friend. "She made me realize that her limitations, like mine and everyone else's are just things to get over," Graff says. "And it doesn't happen unless you try.". This wasn't Graff first bit of mountaineering for Time-while covering the Bosnian war in 1993 he once had to make his way through mountainous terrain at night with Serbian soldiers firing on his position-and it reminded him of something he'd learned then. "You can push yourself a little further than you thought," he says. "It's good to know".<BR>
To reconnect with simple powerful lessons like that, people sometimes need a drastic change of scene that leaves them alone with themselves, even if they are not by themselves.<BR>
That's why, as Europeans take their holiday this summer, they aren't all lounging by the sea. According to one recent survey, so-called adventure bookings in the UK are up 37% since 2002, to 4.5 million, with hiking and rambling the most popular, and cycling and mountaineering not far behind. We like a good ramble as much as anyone, so we decided to devote this year's European Journey special issue to the greatest treks, quests and pilgrimages we could find. Not all of them involve strenuous exercise, but they do invigorate the spirit.<BR>
Of course, in secular Europe the spirit takes many forms. Just ask sportswriter Simon Kuper, who in this issue reflects on his journeys to the great football cathedrals of Europe; or British author Adam Nicolson who describes growing up in Sissinghurst, arguably England's lo veliest garden, and watching the pilgrims come to him. Writer Michael Brunton rode his London-battered mountain bike high into the Italian Alps in search of the shrine of Madonna del Ghisallo-the patron saint of cyclists. Brunton is not a churchgoer, but in this mountainside chapel, he says, he found a "vibrant place that connects the past with the present, the living with the dead, and draws on a collective human passion that even the nonbeliever can recognize as religious."<BR>
Food writer Lydia Itoi discovered the same sort of passion during her extraordinary 36-day, 780-km hike on the Camino de Santiago, one of the great ancient pilgrim trails of Europe. Today's campaigners on the Camino are as likely to be driven by a thirst of adventure as by conventional faith, but whatever they expected, self-discovery is part of the bargain. After all, a journey of over a million steps gives you plenty of time to listen to yourself think. "Where are you from?" has always been a hard question for me," says Itoit, a freelance food and travel writer who was raised in Japan and the U.S. but has lived all over the world. "But the Camino blurs nationality-for the first time ever, I felt part of a diverse community."<BR>
Communal bonds were also at the heart of Reporter Ursula Sautter's pilgrimage, a 21-km Volksmarch, or group hike, through the woods near Re ngsdorf, Germany. The walk took Sautter back to her own teenage years, when she made these excursions with her family and friends-as some 2 million Germans still do every year. "The sounds of stomping feet were the same", she says, "and so was the unique aroma of liverwurst sandwiches coming from the depths of my rucksack."<BR>
For deputy editor James Geary, the unique aroma of pilgrimage belonged to Sweny's lemon soap-a Dublin product that Leopold Bloom carries in his pocket in the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses, and that Geary and throngs of other Joyce devotees bought on June 16, the centenary of Bloomsday, the day on which Joyce's masterpiece is set. "Few works of art inspire people to do such silly things at the same time," says Geary. "People from all over the world travel to Dublin to recreate a day that exists only in the imagination."<BR>
Why do Joyce pilgrims-or any of the other questers in this issue-do all this? It's easy to overthink the answer. As Itoi says, "sometimes you just have to hit the road."<BR>
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Eric Pooley, Editor<BR>
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Regards,<BR>
Rosina<BR>
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