Home We Are

I'm happy to report that Linda and I arrived home safely last night around 9PM. We were happy to see our house again, especially the big "Welcome Home" banner taped across the front door by friends. We were especially happy to sleep in our own bed again. Even the most comfortable beds on the road, even the king-size beds where we needed to catch a bus to touch each other, couldn't match the feeling of getting horizontal at the end of a long day in my 15-year-old waterbed.

It was a fantastic trip, lasting 31 days and covering 7,502 miles. We covered 20 states, and in a dozen separate places rendezvoused with friends and family: Cleveland, Des Moines, Cheyenne, Boulder, Steamboat Springs, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Cincinnati, Oakland (Maryland), and Elizabethtown (Pennsylvania). In between all the visiting, we had nine days to ourselves in which we explored the canyons, red rocks, and national parks of southern Utah and northern Arizona, eye-popping travels shared mainly with tourists from Europe, most of whom spoke German (they get their annual vacations in September).

Every single day of the trip was special, more so than Linda and I could capture in the blogs we wrote on the run. Time for quiet contemplation was scarce even on the days when we didn't drive that much, and some of what we wrote was hurried and contained more summary than detail. But people have responded to what we did post, and my aim all along has been to write a book about this trip. Partly it will be a travelogue, but primarily it will be about how Linda and I built her dozen dialysis treatments into the fabric and purpose of this trip. We wanted to show first of all that it could be done--that dialysis wasn't a barrier to travel but simply one more factor to incorporate into the logistics of a month-long vacation. And we wanted to show how to do it--how to be resilient in doing something remarkable and memorable every day while simultaneously experiencing the roller-coaster ride of a dialysis patient's health.

Linda was fantastic on this trip. There were times when her energy flagged, and times when she wasn't able to tackle the trails I took to get the most spectacular views of those amazing western parks. But she pushed herself as hard as she could in order to see as much as she could see, and didn't complain. We both ran out of steam in the final week, partly from spending so much time driving, and partly from too many restaurant meals. I was surprised to weigh myself this morning and discover that I only gained a little over three pounds. It felt like much more in recent days. I think what saved me was avoiding sweets for the most part, and drinking ice water instead of soda at most of the restaurant meals. Our goal today, our first day back, is to eat as little as possible.

When we began this trip, I assumed that at some point, something would get screwed up (a dialysis treatment, a visit with friends, not getting someplace on time, some kind of mishap or misunderstanding) and we've have to make a drastic change in our plans. But nothing bad happened. We got everywhere we said we would when we were supposed to, enjoyed every visit so much that it became tougher and tougher to say goodbye to friends old and new, and had no setbacks.

I also assumed that if we pulled off this trip successfully, it would launch us on an even longer trip next September, covering most of the west coast and the national parks of Wyoming and Montana. But we've changed our minds about that grandiose plan. A full month was about a week too long--a couple of thousand miles too many in the car, too many days without home-cooked meals, and especially for Linda, too long without the stabilizing and satisfying daily routine that we have here at home. Just because we proved that you can spend a month on the road with dialysis, it does not follow that we have to make the next trip more ambitious. Two or three weeks will suffice in the future, so we're not sure how the next trip will unfold. Maybe we'll have to fly to California and rent a car to explore the coast and visit our many friends out there. Maybe we'll make a shorter loop than this trip's, going no further west than Wyoming. Or perhaps we'll travel south from here. Hmmm--I can see a trip with stops in Washington D.C., Charlottesville, Savannah, the Great Smokies, etc.

We're grateful that you've come along on this trip with us. Many of our friends have followed this blog for the travelogue, and many people we don't know have followed it for the dialysis saga. We've been told that the trip was inspiring and enlightening. That's great. We were inspired and enlightened by it ourselves. We did it! And we hope others will follow in our footsteps. Now all I have to do is figure out how to post the photos that go with each blog--and of course figure out the itinerary for the next trip.