Inspiration through travel

I like to walk, and I like to travel. I especially like walking in Europe, so a few years ago I started going on walking tours on my summer vacations.

For my first walk I chose to explore a part of France I'd never heard of--the Dordogne. Situated in the south-west part of the country, it's a little off the beaten track, and relatively free of tourists. To get there I took a train from Paris to Soulliac. Coincidentally, I had friends who ran a market garden in nearby Cahors, so I could visit with them after the walk.

I was stunned by the beauty of the Dordogne region. Each day of the tour brought more astonishing sights and experiences. The architecture was exquisitly beautiful, I thought. Magnificent chateaux, little stone houses topped with conical roofs as steep as magicians' hats, spectacular old churches. The scenery was equally lovely, mostly undeveloped rural landscapes dotted with orchards, vineyards and forests.

The food was perhaps the biggest surprise. I'd eaten in France before, but this time I was offered what turned out to be some of the best meals of my life. Natural, local produce, duck and goose specialties, to-die-for desserts, and the wine! It was all cheap, cheap, cheap, too, by my standards.

When we weren't eating, drinking  and walking we visited some pretty impressive local sites. The cave system in LaCave was the largest and most interesting I'd ever seen. And the ancient pilgrimage town of Rocamadour was so beautiful that I started to think romance.
  
And so it was here that I began to think of writing a romance novel. What could be a better place than the Dordogne River Valley to set a sexy, romantic story about a woman who is seduced by her French lover just as much as she is by the food, wine, history, architecture and landscape of his homeland?

I got busy, and after a few years I'd produced a passable first draft of The Cult of the Black Virgin. Much later, it was published an an e-book. Now anyone can read about the beauties of the Dordogne region of France, which will always live in my heart as one of the world's special places.


Visit Amazon for a closer look.