Working on a story about long-distance hiking trails tonight, I was reminded of a night nearly 3 years ago, in Dover, when I heard about the Camino de Santiago for the first time.

Not many people visit Dover in early January. In fact, not that many people visit Dover at all - my British roommates were mystified when I announced that I'd be making a detour to the run-down port town on my way back from Christmas in Canada.

What could I say?

Should I have told them that when I couldn't sleep in my first year of college - which was often - I used to re-read Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" over and over, until its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" sent me off to sleep? Or should I have explained that I feel much the same way about run-down port towns as I do about abandoned puppies at the pound, or feisty underdogs in sports movies?

At any rate, I went. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that my two days in Dover continue to hold a place very near the top of my list of Most Powerful Travel Experiences So Far.

*

As I said, not many people visit Dover in early January. Which meant that when I wound my way up the famous cliffs to Dover Castle - the town's only real tourist attraction - just after opening time one morning, I was completely alone. "You're the only one up there this morning," the ticket vendor told me, and I left him behind and climbed the remaining distance to the top.

It's a strange thing, finding yourself completely alone on top of a cliff, with cold January fog rolling in and the ruins of maybe a hundred wars surrounding you. Dover Castle's military history spans 2000 tangible, bloody years - from Roman Britain, represented on the site by the dark, gaping remnants of a lighthouse, to the Second World War, when Britain's military leadership burrowed deep under the medieval castle, into the white cliffs, to plot the Normandy landings.

You can visit the tunnels: dim, eerie, decorated with metal cots and antique surgical instruments, pin-sprouting maps and rows and rows of old-fashioned telephones. And you can make a circuit of the castle's medieval walls, looking out across the empty grounds dotted with ruins. You can visit the lighthouse too - though I didn't, in the end. I had one foot across the ancient threshold when all of a sudden I thought: People died here.

*

By the time I left the castle after a few hours of silent wandering, I was still the day's only visitor.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach - what's left of it, between the multi-lane highway and the sprawling ferry terminal it leads to - trying to square the loud, stark reality of present-day Dover Beach with the calm, dark presence I'd found in the Arnold poem. Trying to explain to my notebook why my heart reached out so quickly to an ugly, hard-used town like Dover. The kind of town where a small plaque on the beach simply notes the number of tonnes of shrapnel that rained down on it during the war. The kind of town that exists entirely to send people elsewhere.

When the lock-out ended at 5, I made my way back to the hostel. There was only one other guest: an elderly Australian woman. After rattling around together for awhile in the silence and the rows of empty bunks, we decided to go out for dinner. And at dinner, in a small Chinese restaurant that seemed to be the only place open for business in town, she told me her story.

She'd been born right here in Dover, just as the war was getting started. She'd been just old enough to remember, dimly, the sounds of the bombardments, the dark nights in a shelter. After the war, her family had moved to Australia, where she'd lived for nearly 60 years.

"I turned 65, I got a divorce, and I decided to see the world," she told me over chow mein. Then she told me about the Camino. I'd never heard of it before, this legendary pilgrimage route through Spain, and if it had been any other day I probably would have been skeptical as she spun her tale of physical achievement and spiritual fulfillment. But the story grabbed me.

I was still a fairly inexperienced traveler then, and I'm not even sure what captivated me most: the existence of the pilgrimage route itself, the 67-year-old woman in front of me who'd hiked it solo, or the fact that there I was sitting in a strange place, listening to the story over noodles.

The conversation was eye-opening on so many levels. Coming on the heels of my day at the castle, it only compounded my newfound understanding of the awesome, humbling power of travel.