I had really written Two Tickets to Dubrovnik as a stand-alone novella. However, with the feedback I received from readers about how it could work out with the characters and my own interest in them, I considered a sequel. How to continue was the challenge. For a few months I thought about what I may do and then homed in on my times in France and the French connection in the first book. I also thought that it would be good to develop the main caharacter, Andrew Johnston, as well as his brother, Adrian, a little further and so took up the themes of conversations between the two in the Langedoc. It seemed to work and I was able to enlarge on some general issues in the world as well as give a brief outline of some of the fascinating places of interest in the region.

   The idea of introducing Les Chemins de St Jacques or The way of St James first emerged when I was describing the visit of Andrew and Adrian to Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert and its connection with the pilgrim walk. However, the notion really crystallised when Lucien Delasalles was outling the history of St Emilion and its connection with Les Chemins over dinner and I started to research the subject in some detail. I managed to find an old copy of the Guide Europeen des Chemins de Compostelle by Jean Bourdarias and Michel Wasielewski and, although I had to translate it from French, it proved to be an invaluable guide to the Way and its history and present. Its map of the various routes on the Way, stretching into Croatia, gave me the essential link back to Dubrovnik, apart, of course, from the personal one between Andrew and Niki.

   The importance of the pilgrim walk to Medieval Christianity was extremely high and, although it lost its appeal over the past two to three hundred years, it has enjoyed an enormous revival over the past fifty years and is once again an extremely popular pilgrim trail, although generally only a relatively small part of the Walk is taken. Huge numbers of Europeans and North Americans, in particular, take tours over the final stretches of the walk and its popularity has soared among the faithful. As Laurie Dennet, a former chairman of the Confraternity of St James said to a Gathering of Pilgrims in Toronto in 2005, “There is an old saying that one’s pilgrimage does not end in Santiago – it begins there, and I am sure that all of us have discovered the truth of that through experience. We return to the lives we left; we are the same, yet not the same; we have gained new perspectives, our experience has reaffirmed some fundamentals that we knew all along. The values we come to appreciate on the Camino and which, I assume, are what have brought us together here today, transcend all the barriers: age, language, race, religion, economic status and educational level. The world – our society – so often seems at odds with those values.  To me, and, I suspect, to you also, the pilgrimage to Santiago offers a hopeful vision of how things might be different.”