By Max Milano (Travel Writer) Morning is quiet and thick with mist. After nearly a month on the Road to Santiago, it feels like forever. My feet sink into the cold water of a Galician ría, eyes fixed on the fjord-like channel ahead until it vanishes into fog. The pines across the ría blur between green and gray, their slopes hidden by a drifting veil of fog that slides down to the waterline. Coastal Galicia […]
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By Max Milano Dusk on Laredo beach. My feet sink into the wet sand as the last surf pulls back. We’ve come a long, hot way from La Rioja, via Vitoria-Gasteiz, skirting Bilbao’s police state cameras and slow-motion speed traps on the freeways and B roads. We’ve been chasing the coast, longing for cooler air. It was an asphalt-melting thirty-five degrees today in Vitoria-Gasteiz. We find relief on the Cantabrian shore. Laredo. A name that […]
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A Pilgrim’s Road Trip Along the Camino de Santiago By Max Milano, Travel Writer & Photographer It has been a long, tough road to get to La Rioja, Spain’s premier wine region, but it’s been worth it. We’ve set our GPS to avoid tolls so we can really see the country. The freeways in Spain are antiseptic and empty, skirting small towns and cities like a gerrymandered political map. We want to see the little […]
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A Pilgrim’s Road Trip Along the Camino de Santiago By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) “We’re staying in a retirement home for old ETA members,” I hear my wife say from the bedroom as I sip a Scotch and Coke Zero on the balcony of the Hotel Arriaga in Bilbao. Below me, a narrow alley funnels the whole of humanity into the maze of Bilbao’s Old Town. I hear Dutch. German. Latin American Spanish. […]
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A Pilgrim’s Road Trip Along the Camino de Santiago By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) The Med in August is hot like fish soup. The air hangs heavy. The palms don’t move and the heat rides up from the Sahara with the sirocco. Yellow dust settles at dusk, and it’s 9:30 p.m. before the sun drops, because Spain still runs on Berlin time, a gift from Franco to Hitler that no one’s bothered to […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) I’m standing on a wobbly iron bridge bolted to the cliffs of Cuenca. They say it’s built in the Eiffel style, but when you step out onto it, it feels more Indiana Jones than Paris. The metal creaks underfoot. Hundreds of feet below, a river snakes through a canyon so deep you can hear it before you see it. Thick brush hides the water, but nothing hides the […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer) I, like most tourists and expats, must’ve driven past Sagunto a hundred times. Always between Valencia and Barcelona. Always in a rush. The AP-7 skirts along the Mediterranean, passing citrus groves, factory outlets, beach towns with nondescript condos, and even a Roman aqueduct. But then there’s that hill, the one crowned by an ancient fortress that seems to grow out of the stone itself. I never stopped. Most tourists don’t. […]
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At some point in every expat’s journey through Spain, somewhere between your third bocadillo de jamón and your first encounter with the dreaded Ayuntamiento, you’ll feel it. That itch. The one that whispers, ‘You need to start a business.’ Maybe it’s a beachside café. Maybe a yoga retreat in the hills of Ronda. Maybe you’ve got a software idea you swear will change the world, or at least solve one weird Spanish paperwork problem. Whatever […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer) The day of the driving test finally came. Months of waiting. Over a thousand euros spent on driving school fees, paperwork, and lessons. He’d already flunked the first written exam. This was the last chance before the whole thing reset. Another fail would mean 300 euros to re-enroll in the school. The written exam stayed valid for two years, but the rest? Gone. Then 50 euros per driving lesson, with […]
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by Max Milano (Travel Writer). Valencian fishermen leave port before dawn to haul in the day’s catch, so there’s something about being out on a boat under the hot midday sun that makes them tired and hungry. It was out on the warm waters of the Mediterranean, just off the coast of Gandia, sometime in the early 20th century (around the 1930s) that a hungry captain aboard the Santa Isabel waited for his lunch. He […]
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