Our story starts at 8:00 pm in an airport in Bilbao, Spain. Luke and I had been traveling for about 20 hours, and I didn’t get a wink of sleep on the plane. All we wanted was to get our boards in the van and sleep. Sure enough, the airline lost our boards. Luke and I left the airport worried and tired. We picked up our home for the next 6 days-a Fiat camper van. Little did we know it was actually manual, and we didn’t know how to drive manual. After a night of stalling and grinding gears, Luke and I made it to the parking lot we were told we could sleep.

The next day, we returned to the airport. Luckily, we found our boards sitting in the oversized luggage. Our epic trip began here. We decided to drive west and play it by ear, and that’s exactly what we did. We got out of the city as quick as possible, not without stopping in the middle of the street a couple times after stalling the van. Luke told me he found a place we can camp and it looked like there were waves, so we headed there as quick as possible. We arrived at this grassy bluff that descended to a fun looking beach break. We parked the van, threw wax on our boards, and I threw on my JBB boardshorts hoping the water was warm enough. It was. We scored for about 30 minutes until in the blink of an eye, the sun disappeared, and we could hear thunder roaring above us. The next day, we drove further west to a wave called Rodiles. Rodiles was fabled to be a mini Mundaka.

When we got there, it was flat. We checked out the small town just inland for a burger and beer. We knew there were supposed to be waves coming, so we decided to stay the night. The next day, we woke up to a pumping left sand bar. It was a mini Mundaka. We paddled out and were basically alone for an hour and a half-trading waves and sharing laughs in the lineup. We continued to surf for another two hours until our arms were about to fall off. Luke and I were so wiped out that we had to stay another night. The next day, we surfed Rodiles and decided to leave. We headed east to finish out our trip. By this point, the waves had shrunk and the weather had gotten worse. We stopped to sleep and surf where we stayed the first night out of the city. It was small, but it felt good to get in the water after two hours of driving. That night, we enjoyed a beautiful sunset and the good company of other campers. By the next morning, neither one of us could stand living in that van. Our backs hurt and we were fried from surfing every day, so we decided to head home. We dropped off the van and got on our way to our apartment in Spain. Our trip had come to an end and both of us had never sleep better than we did that night. We could finally take a shower and sleep in a real bed.