By Max Milano (Travel Writer and Photographer) This is part five of a six part El Camino de Santiago Roadtrip. You can read the rest of the chapters here. Hanging around Santiago de Compostela, surrounded by unenthusiastic pilgrims completing their camino by feebly posing for social media posts, was getting me down. So we decided to head out to Cape Fisterra, the end of the earth as the Romans thought. Only later did we learn […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

By Max Milano (Travel Writer) We didn’t do the Camino to find ourselves. We did the Camino de Santiago because the Mediterranean summer tried to kill us. We weren’t looking for God, inner peace, or enlightenment. We did it because in July on the Costa Blanca the air stops moving and the Med becomes a hot lake. Fish soup. The sea is so hot and still that even the Roman garum vats that dot the […]