Red Rock Road, Light Blue Sea

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Edging Spain, southern France, and Portugal, a midlife couple tracks landscapes between bliss and burnout, art and love. After the rigors of wild camping, a Formentera cottage offers cozy comfort, honeymoon bliss, creative freedom. Noella sketches in watercolor, while Wilson skirts the boundaries of the postmodern novel. Amid the wild and picturesque beauty of landscape and sea, the refuge becomes a crucible of creative and romantic tension. Will it yield despair and separation-or, through willing embrace, a new intimacy, a new metafictional art? The travel sections of this multi-genre work chronicle their backpacking trip at the edge of the pilgrimage map, as Wilson and Noella chase sun and a haunting Moorish palace. Red Rock Road serves as more than a narrative guide through the backcountry of Iberia's wild places-its rocky coves, mountain passes, castles and monasteries, orchards and stone villages, ancient terraces and deserted beaches. It gives the reader a spiritual map to explore the nature of freedom, its potentials and limitations in the context of landscape and history, self and other. Wilson and Noella navigate myriad obstacles in meeting basic daily needs for water, food, shelter from the elements. As they pursue their journey with curiosity and flexibility, they are stretched to the limit of their physical and emotional resources. Thwarted by competing tourists and poor timing, and pushed by the early onset of winter on the coast and in the mountains, the couple seeks respite at their final destination, a cottage on the island of Formentera. On their idyllic island retreat, the quixotic quest turns to the realm of experimental art: Noella's watercolors, Wilson's writing. Romantic conflict ensues from Wilson's relentless ambition to fashion a fiction based on their present experience. Noella suffers a toothache which deepens to the pain of an identity crisis: artist, lover, mother, nothing at all? Winter closes in, harbinger of the end of the romantic idyll. Wilson is challenged-even as he wrestles with his own identity as character and author in this drama-to care and love more deeply, to open more fully to the fire of life.