In the tradition of Colin Fletcher’s The Man Who Walked Through Time and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Edward F. Stanton has written a quietly beautiful and engrossing account of his own pilgrimage. Road of Stars to Santiago is a personal story of his journey along what has been called the premier cultural route of Europe.

I undertook a five-hundred-mile walk along the ancient Camino de Santiago, from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostella in northwest Spain, the supposed burial site of the apostle St. James the Elder, and beyond to Finisterre, Land’s End on the Atlantic coast. On my journey I followed the old road whenever possible, passing through mountains, medieval forests and remote villages, as well as modern towns and cities. I slept in fields, abandoned schools or wherever I could, on a thirty-day trip that brought me into contact with a whole cross-section of Spanish society, and with pilgrims from France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and England. Most of the book has to do with my own trials and joys on the Road: the physical struggle to walk about twenty miles a day in the heat or rain, to find a place to eat and sleep; with the psychological changes that take place when one leaves home, family and routine; with the contradictions inherent to a pilgrimage in the late twentieth centuiy; with experiences that ranged from the spiritual to the picaresque; with the people I met on the way – from shepherds and peasan ts to astrologers and philosophers. There are plenty of humorous situations and unexpected turns.
– Edward F. Stanton