Freewheeling: Rambling in Spain: BOOK III

Having journeyed together on bikes clear from northern Italy, south to Sicily and west across Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the two vagabonds Pike and Emery have separated under mysterious and ominous circumstances. Sans bike, sans Pike, Emery now enters Spain on the ferry boat the Andalucia, aboard which he meets Rita, a lovely surprise acquaintance of the now missing person, Pike.
The two rent a car and drive up the Costa del Sol – the “Sunshine Coast” -- to San Roque, “a lovely Andalusian village with a beautiful old city center and steep streets, whitewashed courtyards, and balconies full of flowers. They drove on to Estepona, the legendary Salduba, the Muslim Estebbuna, from which they again could see the heights of Gibraltar and still further mountains of North Africa. Estepona shone white against the sparkling blue sea."
Eventually they land in the town of Benalúa de Guadix in the eastern part of the Province of Granada, where the people literally “lived under the ground. In the Barrio Santiago region of the Sierra Nevada were over two thousand Guadixian-style cave homes. In downtown Guadix, signs pointed to the "Barrio Troglodyte" – the cave district.”
It was mid-January when “Emery and Rita took the Metro to the Madrid airport. Pike was flying in from Boston’s Logan Airport on a direct Delta Airlines flight. Emery cried when he saw him – Pike looked happy. Rita gasped. The not so long ago emaciated Pike had put some weight back on. His cheeks were almost plump. His clothes were neat and tidy. He looked good. He had his heavy, hairy golden coat over his arm, and only a light pack on his back. On Pike's head was a big new smooth and golden Stetson cowboy hat. "

Tom Foran Clark, a native Californian born in Burbank, went to public schools, completed his undergraduate studies in Logan, Utah, and graduate studies in Boston, Massachusetts. He has lived and worked in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, France, and Germany. He is the author of The Significance of Being Frank, a biography of the 19th century Concord, Massachusetts schoolteacher and Radical Abolitionist Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, himself the chronicler and biographer of the life and times of John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Clark is also the author of Riding in Italy and Derailed in North Africa, the first two books of his four-part adventure fiction series, Freewheeling, and a collection of short stories, The House of Great Spirit: Five Stories. Beyond his writing and vagabonding, Clark has worked, variously over the years, in advertising as a graphic artist and copy editor, a quality assurance engineer for assorted eBooks and marketing firms and, occasionally, off and on, a public library director. Long a bookman, for several years he has been the proprietor of the online bookstore, The Bungalow Shop.