The one-two punch combo of dance class and office work is her show of defiance to the cancer and chemotherapy. She does it even though it hurts. But she knows it’s more important to do it than to do it perfectly, so she goes and tries her best. And it helps get her ready for for two more glorious weeks of Cancerpalooza before she takes the poision again.
We take naps too. Trish doesn’t nap every day, but she is increasingly fatigued. Chemotherapy degenerates the body over time, and it gets tired trying to rebuild the healthy cells. And as her red blood cell counts get lower, her muscles and organs get less and less oxygen.
We wanted to travel the globe with our daughters if Trish got better.
And she did. And we went.
In the 90′s, Trish and I had a period of traveling during which we could not seem to get to our destination. Our problems included drunken pilots (really), being sent to the wrong Caribbean island (really), failed attempts to land planes in the smoke of a nearby forest fire, lots of winter ice delays and many ‘oversold conditions’. In those days, airlines gave high-value travel vouchers every time there was a mishap and Trisha and I made a living off their mistakes. I don’t think we actually paid for tickets (or arrived on time) for about three years in the late 90′s. It was a glorious time for the budget traveler.
We’re in between trips and life feels a little slow. It’s too cold to go camping and work keeps us tethered to the house.
How does a restless family blow off some steam? At a rock show of course! We splurged on tickets for glam-rock gods KISS and tween favorite Miley Cyrus, both at the downtown Washington DC Verizon center.
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Creekmoreworld.com is a travel blog for exotic family adventures. We are David, age 40; Trisha, age 45; Lily, age 7 and Emma, age 9. Washington D.C. is our home, although Trisha is from the Bay Area and David is from New York.
The adults are avid scuba divers, skiers, video game players and fans of heavy metal. In her youth, Trisha went on long backpacking journeys to Thailand, Central America, Europe and Turkey. David spent many months traveling Russia and the Soviet republics, from the Black Sea to Lake Baikal.
In 2003, Trish was diagnosed with a dangerous breast cancer. The real possibility of death made us rethink our lives, and together we committed to travel more if Trish survived. Our girls were still babies then. In her chemo haze, Trish would fantasize about taking a year off to travel the globe with them. It gave her the strength to continue the ghastly treatments.
Trish remains cancer free and the kids are now old enough to handle adventure travel. Our goal is still to spend a year abroad. But rather than take a whole year off, we are doing a series of month-long trips. The kids love their school and we enjoy our careers, which permit us to travel quite a bit. We are fortunate in that way. By the end of 2010, we should be a third of the way to our ‘year-abroad’ goal.
Most of our blogs are ‘live’ — we post daily while on the road. Our primary purpose is to record our travel for kids, friends and family. If we can help or encourage other families to travel more adventurously, it would be a bonus. For us, there is no purer expression of life than traveling as a family.
David currently works at an international non-profit in management and Trisha is a journalist and Web producer, working most recently at Discovery Channel and PBS. A long time ago, she wrote guidebooks to Belize and Norway. They’re probably incredibly out-of-date by now, so don’t buy them.
