Sofia Somewhere

Since we had no classes on Friday, I went with a few friends to visit Torreciudad for the day. Torreciudad is a shrine dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It's located in the north of Spain, about a 3 hour drive by car from Pamplona. Since the eleventh century, people have kept alive the custom of coming on pilgrimage to pray to Our Lady. The actual shrine was built under the guidance of the St. Josemaria Escriva and was inaugurated on July 7, 1975. He built the shrine out of his love for Mary and so that other people may come shore their love and receive spiritual miracles. He hoped for “the conversion and the peace of many souls.” The story of St. Josemaria is that when he was two years old, he and his sisters fell seriously ill. His sisters died, but after much praying to the Virgin from his mother, St. Josemaria lived. Later on, his mother with his father brought him to Torreciudad (then just a tower, and a small hermitage) to give thanks to the Lady. Much later on, St. Jos

Way overdue but here it is. We left Pamplona for Rome on the 3 rd of April and as the bus pulled out of the parking lot we prepared ourselves for a 24-hour trip on the bus. I was part of the Larrabide group, we were ten: me, Larri, ShanShan, Marina, Emilia, Patri, Isabel, Elisa, Teresa and Clara. But we were part of a much larger group, which was composed of practically all the women in the University of Navarra (and from Pamplona) that were going to Rome. We started the trip off with a prayer, of course, and then passed around some gummies. Bad idea; I ate too much and spent the next two hours with a stomach-ache. Fortunately, we stopped soon after that at a gas station in the border of France. The trip went smoothly from there. We watched a film, I read a little, and stopped a few hours later for dinner. We watched another film afterwards but I fell asleep in the middle. When I woke up we were in Italy already! The hours passed by and the journey didn’t feel too tiring. We stop