The Road to Caledonia

Gwen McDonald, a sixty-something disillusioned community college professor, has, for thirty years, embarked on a yearly pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to commune with her fiancé who was killed four decades earlier. After receiving the news she has a terminal illness, Gwen makes an impromptu journey to the Wall where she is met with a most improbable set of circumstances. Given the chance to change the outcome of the key defining moment of her life, she must decide whether to follow her heart or her conscience. Her final decision sets into motion a series of events that will assure the happiness and security of her daughter who lives in fear of an abusive husband, her grandson whom she fears will become like the men in his father's family, and her best friend who appears to be in the final stages of Alzheimer's. Yet, in the end, she must determine what was reality and what was fantasy. Shifting between a small town in Central Florida and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, The Road to Caledonia challenges the reader to examine whether the opportunity to relive one's most cherished memory for all time is worth the price exacted.