Flying with El Condor

With an obsession to spend a night alone in Machu Picchu and communicate with Los Dios, a spirited young woman pursues adventure in Peru in 1958. What begins with Carolyn's first teaching job in Lima becomes a ten year commitment working and raising a family in South America during the Cold War years, when Communism was a dangerous threat around the world.

Through a series of humorous vignettes, we follow Carolyn's romances: engagement to a Swede with a motorcycle; then finding Russ, the true love of her life, whom she marries after a three-week courtship and only one date. Together, after hitchhiking through South America and experiencing the realities of the Third World and anti-American propaganda, the couple begins growing up.

Russ becomes a Foreign Service Officer in the United States Diplomatic Corps on important and dangerous assignments in Venezuela and Brazil. Russ and Carolyn leave the United States during the Happy Days, a time of innocence and optimism, and return home to a different country in the Seventies.

Each episode in her memoir is a new awareness, an epiphany, a turning point for Carolyn. Throughout ten years living the life of a senora, Carolyn continues her spiritual pursuit, symbolized by El Condor, the great bird who flies between heaven and earth, a messenger and guide to mankind. Her encounters include a Nazi hiding in South America; Olga, a Russian spy; a Macumba priestess and a procession of maids involved in the black arts; Don Pedro, a nudist in hot pursuit; and a Deaconess of the Church, also in hot pursuit - of Russ.

The story is a small piece of history, a nostalgic glimpse of an era when morals were strict, ideals were high, and optimism kept us strong.