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.
She starts her second week with a bang, doing a 90 minute dance class Monday night, and going into her contractor job at Voice of America on Tuesday morning.
I’m proud of her for pushing to shake off the chemo treatment this way. It would be easy to stay on the couch and say “I just had a rough week and I’ve earned another day of rest.’
She inspires me.
.
On this Monday, Trish and I crawl along the beltway in rush hour traffic to a non-descript office park in Fairfax. Normally, this would be considered a punishment, but today we enjoy something special: a visit to the development studio of our favorite game, Warhammer Online.
We wanted to travel the globe with our daughters if Trish got better.
And she did. And we went.
Trish and I had a sad, hurtful, destructive fight earlier today. We both said things we deeply regret. I guess the stress got to us.
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.
