Upcoming Trip and a Trip Not Taken

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It's almost vacation time for me. Two more weeks, and my sister and I take off for South America, where we will undoubtedly get lost somewhere. We always do, but that's part of the fun. We'll be visitng Ushuai, at the southern tip of Argentina, where Ralph and I went on a "big trip" in 2002. No, the RV picture's not about that one.

The summer before Ralph got sick, we were in Iowa visiting his family, and we spent one day visiting his younger brother, who lived a couple of hours away. We stopped at a beautiful Iowa transportation building on the way, and I picked up some brochures about the state. "Let's take a trip across the country," I said. "All the way, east to west. I'll write a travel book and you'll take the pictures."

"Okay," Ralph said.

"Next summer."

"Maybe the summer after." Ralph was a champion procratinator, so I was stunned when I arrived home after a trip with my sister to find a huge RV in our driveway. "Surprise," he said. He'd bought a 50% share in a friend's RV.

We decided we'd take a trial trip to the Texas Hill Country in October, but by then our lives had changed. Ralph was diagnosed with a precursor to leukemia and was waiting for an appointment at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. No trip to the Hill Country. For weeks, until his friend came and drove it away, the RV stood in our driveway, like an ungainly monster, the symbol of a trip we would never take.