A month-long journey through succulent northern Spain, through time, through mind-numbing physical fatigue leads the pilgrim to the cathedral of Santiago. Awaiting her lies a buried apostle, the absolution of all sin and a down-to-the-pore cleansing of mind, body and soul. This is the Camino de Santiago, one of the most holy Christian rites of passage, and this past April, two secular Jews and a questioning Catholic, walked 150 kilometers of its sacred roads.

Our slightly abbreviated seven-day pilgrimage started as quixotically as did this article, with anticipation of certain inevitable enlightenment. The formula, like something out of Spirituality for Dummies, was flawless.

First, for some corporeal mortification, you have your angry mountain blizzards, knee-deep mud and a back-pack half my cowering size. Then, for some undisturbed personal reflection, you throw in full-day hikes through infinite landscape, so vast and repeating that only an occasional mound of cow droppings breaks its harmony. Next, a diet of cheese, meat and soup (obscenely fresh) and Spanish wine (dangerously cheap and inebriating) provides the pilgrim with a more heathen form of gratification. Finally, the unshakable trail of other self-righteous pilgrims, dishing out hospitality that would suffocate a Southern housewife, ensures that in this most intimate process of self-discovery, we make some friends, share some stories and smoke some pot.

After a six-hour bus ride, we arrived in Madrid, dark, unpleasant and still mired in recent tragedy. With generic hiking gear (freshly purchased from the Pilgrim section of the local department store) clumsily slung over our backs and three walking sticks (equally new but deceptively worn and woodsy) click-clacking against the train-station floor, our cookie-cutter Camino de Santiago ensemble announced our spiritual destination.

We were pilgrims, and in ultra-Catholic Spain, that guaranteed a smile from even the nastiest night-shift employee. After uncomfortable, scattered snippets of sleep, the night train deposited us in the drafty desolation of a Galician town, where I soaked up the novelty of sleeping on a nearby bench. The drastic movements I had been making through the world finally began to sink in.

Before dawn, before the first cow mooed, we went in search for a local bar. There, we began our day with saccharine coffee and bloody news images. Five hours later on a snowy mountaintop highway, we began our pilgrimage, fighting more ice and boredom in the first hour than I would in the next seven days.

With the guidance of little yellow arrows sprinkled along the designated paths, we walked a wedge of forgotten Spanish countryside, large enough to trace on a global map. On our first day, we moved so slowly, I sometimes suspected we traveled in circles or back in time, as identical stone villages continued to materialize in the endless terrain. In every village there was a black dog, propped up on his front paws, watching us pass through his dimension of huts, churches and manure.

Shelter from the storm came in the form of nuts, cheese and soup, in a pilgrim cluttered bar. There, we met a ruddy German woman who had been walking for a month, and our muscles, fatigued after only a few hours, burned with shame. Warmed up by tea and the status-quo pilgrim hospitality (wishes for a buen camino hung from every stranger's lips), we scurried back out into the snow, which in a few hours time became rain, and then clouds and then sun, as we descended the mean mountain into moist Galician hills. By the end of our first day, I was wetter, colder and happier than I could remember. But I may have been too tired to remember.

The rest of the journey may as well have been one day, dreamed of and remembered in many different versions. We were fed the same pilgrim menu in the same pilgrim diners served with the same provincial doting and concern. We slept in pilgrim hostels, free with proper documentation from pilgrim headquarters, sometimes in naked beds, sometimes on the floor, but always in loud company. The nights were spent in towns, where we got our daily dose of civilization. Sometimes we saw teenagers driving around in cars and I wondered how these people could live here. Didn't they know they were floating in an anonymous landscape, spending their lives in a pilgrim's oasis?

We woke up to the shuffle of bodies getting ready in the dark. Soon enough, the sound of plastic backpack straps, elastic shoelaces and everything polyester and impermeable became more peaceful and natural than the chirping of birds. Even my canteen (proudly dangling from my neck) babbled more realistically than a brook. Cold mornings became simmering afternoons as we walked, ate and talked for what seemed like a monotonous forever, with no boredom, worry or doubt. When the future is no more stressful or difficult than finding the next yellow arrow, there's very little to worry about. And while our fellow pilgrims were searching for spiritual salvation, the three of us, a bunch of religious misfits intruding on this holy ritual, had nothing comparable at stake. We would sometimes tease the more motivated walkers, who clacked their sticks at a cardio pace, by swerving onto the long thick grass along our path and indulging our weary bodies with rest and sun. In chilly evenings, we drifted into towns, pulled on more layers of the same stinky shirts and went to linger in churches and fruit stands, making it back to our beds or our floor just before we collapsed.

The morning of our last day, with three kilometers still to go, Santiago already hovered in the distance. As we passed the city sign, we faked a moment of delirious happiness, though it may just have been relief, or maybe even disappointment. The climactic end to the 'torture' of the journey is a Mass at the Cathedral of Santiago, held daily for the straggling pilgrims. But for someone who can hardly sit through Yom Kippur services, the prospect of Church was far more grueling than our seven-day hike. The hubbub of exalted pilgrims and their wooden sticks subsided and Mass began. In the lull of a thousand semi-audible prayers, I tried contorting my physical exhaustion into spiritual ease. But every time the priest allowed us to sit down (with us Jews really just playing a game of Simon Says), I drifted into a half sleep of hunger and fatigue. At the end of the Mass, we walked out like children, with food and happiness tightly intertwined.

That night, we were offered shelter in a stern Catholic seminary, where the bare and dirty beds satiated any frustrated desire to be zapped into a 17th century orphanage. I opened the crusty shutters to inspire myself with a panorama of Santiago, but all I saw was the blurry windowpane. It was 10 p.m., way past pilgrim bed-time, but tomorrow's only hike was to the train station. And with my precious dregs of energy (that, for the first time, didn't need to be spared) I called my editor, who demanded that my eager, sloppy words take article shape.

Much to my surprise, this story turned our far less cynical and lighthearted than I expected-too many unabashed sentences dripping with sincerity and sap. And why shouldn't they, when even a yuppie, who believes only in his cell phone, couldn't swat away the divine revelation trailing the pilgrims every agonizing step. Yes, this little field trip, seemingly fit only for travel brochures or New-age cult propaganda, translated rather well into my jaded, agnostic reality. No, I didn't find myself, or change myself, or make dramatic promises on twilit hilltops. But for seven days, I lived this Buddhist clich, by finding unaffected, un-accessorized, unmistakable happiness. Not inspiration, stimulation or delirium-just happiness.