July 27, 2026

A college classmate died two weeks ago, the news came in as we celebrated a birthday. Bob sent me a text in early June: “Hawks fly high.” A few days later he fought his way to his final college class reunion, then passed. Last week Sandy turned 73, we recruited a dozen friends and family for dinner to cheer her on to 74.

Bob and I ran into each other occasionally. He worked hard all his life, first in Connecticut, where he grew up, then later in Florida. He supported local charities and donated a building to our alma mater, St. Anselm. In 2023 he developed glioblastoma, a virulent brain cancer that almost always takes its victims in around 18 months. He battled, gave freely to others of time and personal resources. The school awarded him an honorary degree two years ago. He attended the June reunion using a walker, then entered hospice.

The funeral Mass at St. Anselm was three days ago. Our classmate, Abbot Mark Cooper, Bob’s close friend for fifty-plus years, presided.

So we knew about Bob when we did the birthday at an Italian place in downtown Greenville. Everyone else there was younger. Not all the guests knew each other, but the group mixed nicely. The occasion carried the crowd along, with the drinks, good food, gifts, the giant desserts. The grandsons and the young daughter of a friend, in their cute party clothes, picked up on the excitement. They moved easily among the young adults and the old folks, smiling and laughing.

A gent at a table nearby and his wife walked over and snapped a group photo. The wife smiled. “You have a lovely family,” she called.

“We’re from New Hampshire,” he said. “Nineteen years on the Manchester police force. That was when we were required to be clean-shaven. As soon as I left I grew out this baby.” He stroked his thick mustache. We all laughed.

Laughing came easily, eventually we straggled from the table. Outside, subdued lighting bathed the piazza, folks eased back at their tables, sipped wine and dined. A warm breeze passed among the tables. We got one more photo, and one more “Happy Birthday,” said our goodnights and drifted away.

The midsummer birthday has become a milestone of quiet joy. Seven years Sandy spent it in the ICU at Bryn Mawr Hospital in Pennsylvania recovering from a series of ministrokes or “transient ischemic attacks.” That hard week (reported here several times) now returns to us every July. The point is, seven years is a good chunk of time.

Some cancers, like glioblastoma, attack vengefully. Others becomes ghosts and haunt survivors, who either break or resolve to live willfully in peace with the threats. The medicines, the care, the usual bromides, diet and exercise, are in the mix, but the true lifeline is will to endure, if not overcome. Symptoms and fears may return as months turn into years, but fade when courage returns. So it does.

We are resuming the routine of survival, treasuring the bright times while bearing up against the chaos. The war is on again. Gas prices are up a dime from last week, back over $4.00/gallon in some places. People looking for jobs are wondering how the grocery and restaurant employees found theirs. Companies are using AI to “bank” resumes by advertising openings that don’t exist.

The birthday evening brought powerful memories. In a strange way the New Hampshire folks who joined the singing prompted thoughts of Bob, who seemed happiest on the Manchester campus. A year ago I posted OTR in Brooksville, Florida. He saw it and sent a text asking us to stop by his place in the next county. We found the address and visited with him and Susan for a while.

At that point he was doing well. We sipped coffee and talked about college, about his health. He was playing a little golf, but couldn’t walk the course. We talked about reuniting a few years earlier for the funeral of a Benedictine priest who taught at the school for decades.

He kept writing, offering comments on the posts. He stayed busy, as much as he could, with the college board of directors and local things. He traveled often back to the Manchester campus. But glioblastoma is unforgiving. Arizona Sen. John McCain lived 13 months after diagnosis; Bob endured three years.

He lived a good, virtuous life, devoted to good things. His life taught immortal lessons, endurance, perseverance, fortitude. He smiled often.

The evening reminded us that birthdays matter. We set a course for doing it again. We have a break until fall, then six out through February. Daughter Kathleen turns 40 in October. We’ll see her in September in Idaho for her wedding party. Then the grandkids turn 10 and 13. We’ll make a big deal of it.

Time is racing by, dawn is showing up later, the sun takes a few more moments. Parents of schoolkids are squeezing in vacations. Schools open mid-August. The year will ebb away.

We’re still browsing the photos from Sandy’s big day, the smiles, the girls’ pretty dresses, the five-layer chocolate cake, the heartfelt good wishes. In the morning we stepped up and shouldered the usual chores. We marked the medical appointments on the calendar. I stared at all that, then looked forward to July ’27.

July 20, 2026

Caesar’s Head State Park is an odd, compelling place. The visitors center sits along a two-lane road, U.S. 276, nearly straddling the SC-NC line. A few picnic tables are lined up near the small parking lot. The usual attractions, lake, campground, cabins are missing. A network of trails unfolds above and below the highway. But really, the park is the cliff and the vast view of the rest of the state.

The view reinforces the geographic orientation. South Carolina consists of three broad regions, Upstate, Piedmont, and Low Country. (Tennessee is seen the same way, East, Middle, and West, the sections represented on the state flag.) Our mountains, although humble next to North Carolina’s and Georgia’s, shield the Upstate from those messy Gulf storms that flow up through Alabama and Georgia, cross the Appalachians, and batter the East Coast.

Caesar’s Head is a dot on the state map at the extreme northern corner of Greenville County, which is the extreme northwestern corner of the Upstate. This is a high point, at 3,200 feet, on the southern edge of the Blue Ridge where it starts to peter out in South Carolina. North and west of the border and west of Asheville, the Plott Balsams, another scattering of much taller peaks, stretch west into the Great Smokies.

The easy guess is that the park gets its name by associating the cliff point with the facial profile of the Roman emperor. But you may also read that it’s named after someone’s dog.

Just north of the visitors center a fenced ramp opens into woods and winds for a short distance to an observation deck, which is a rocky outcropping enclosed by a railing. A single telescope is mounted on a stand next to the railing. You don’t need the telescope to look out over the majesty of God’s creation.

From the deck, a narrow steel stairway leads down between massive rock walls to a dark, tight passageway called “Devil’s Kitchen,” which slopes for twenty feet to another viewing point, bordered only by a wood fence. If your heartbeat quickens while squeezing through the Kitchen, you can avoid a rush of vertigo by not looking down, and taking a path to the parking lot.     

Caesar’s Head, almost literally, sweeps the visitor across the state. From the observation-rock platform the view is of the elevator-shaft drop to the mountain floor, then the panorama of nearby hills and ridges out to the gentle roll of the Piedmont. In spring and summer, in clear weather, the view is 50 miles of rich green, fading into pale haze.

Other nearby peaks offer spectacular views. Sassafras and Table Rock are in the 3,000-foot-plus range. Yet South Carolina’s high points really are modest. Not far away, Black Rock, near Sylva, North Carolina, is around 5,800 feet, Mount Mitchell, north of Asheville, is 6,700. Clingman’s Dome in the Great Smokies comes in at 6,600. It’s now a big tourist site, you walk to the summit on an asphalt path. But these Appalachian peaks still are modest.

 Montana’s Tobacco Root mountains offer 43 peaks over 10,000 feet, I climbed at least two of them some years ago. We shivered atop 14,000-foot-high Pikes Peak, where the altitude and chill can give you a headache. But then Pikes ranks only 30th in height among Colorado’s 53 “fourteeners.”

Statistics tell only dry stories. The view from the summits of the tall peaks extends to the limit of the curvature of the earth. You see a panorama of green and brown, sometimes white in winter. Caesar’s Head is a minor tourist stop, with its overlook, gift shop, and, in the visitors center, a plastic three-dimensional mockup of the nearby hills and dales.

But the gorgeousness of Caesar’s Head is in its power to shatter the trite slander of the inland South as a backward, semi-primitive appendage to the nation.

For many outsiders, the South of Gone with the Wind still lives, a region of friendly, chatty folks and some not so friendly, who believe the old myths, the contrived tales of Southern gentility and wholesomeness, Robert E. Lee as a minor deity, and hard-and-fast Republican shibboleths.

Caesar’s Head and its view offer a panorama like any other high place, a panorama of beauty: the richly green, finely drawn outlines of forest, farmland, streams, lakes, roads crisscrossing rural country. No snow-covered peaks, no rugged, craggy rock formations, no classic postcard-quality natural wonders. No Pikes Peak vistas.

It remains that the place is on the fringe of wilderness. A few homesteads line U.S. 11, which intersects with 276. To get to the intersection you pass F-Mart, a six-table breakfast-and-lunch stopoff in the hamlet of Marietta.

As the grandsons and I headed up 11, the rain poured sideways. We stopped at F-Mart, looking for lunch. The place was crowded with local people talking about local things. We ordered, then watched the ladies behind the counter whip up savory comfort food, burgers, patty melts, grilled cheese, chicken fingers. We stretched out lunch, enjoying the easy comfort of the background talk, the clatter of dishes. The rain stopped, we headed up the 3,000 feet and seven-mile curves of 276.

At the visitors center we looked at the 3-D interactive mockup of the mountain that shows nearby Jones Gap and Table Rock parks and, off to the west, Lake Jocassee.  The outside air was chilly but pure and bracing, in the 50s, a relief from the 90s in the flatlands. Rain started to patter down.

I teetered nervously across the rocks to the observation platform, the boys scrambled ahead, no fear. We stood in thick clouds; the clouds that had obscured the mountaintop from below locked us in whiteness, blanking out the view. We slipped through Devil’s Kitchen, backs against the rock walls. The far side showed only the side of the cliff and trees protruding through the clouds.

The boys were good, cheerful and chattering. I shivered a bit. We were in a place alien to the Southern melodrama. It was a redoubt, a place of rugged, mystical beauty. I warmed up the van and navigated down the mountain, around the hairpin turns. Behind us the precipice faded once again, into the clouds.                          

July 13, 2026

Thunderstorms came to Greenville, so downtown’s Falls Park presents as a rich green, although the Reedy River runs low and brown and the famous falls dribble over the rocks. Early in the week we had a nice dinner at an Italian place nearby, avoiding the piazza, which at 6 PM still simmered at around 90F. 

We waited nervously for the new drug, coming by Fedex. This was the course change, a decisive new chemo pill. Even better, no charge, the company is comping it.

The next day brought more sun. In early afternoon we drove back downtown for a couple of errands. Locals and tourists wander through the park among the joggers and cyclists. Folks take to the benches amidst the pretty landscaping along the water. Kids wade in the river. The sun sends down its broiling rays, but midtown is well-shaded, storefront doors are open, sidewalk traffic ebbs and flows. It’s midsummer in the South.

The park is a place to come to. The layout and landscaping are lovely year round. The city embarked on creating the spot in the late 1960s, rescuing the downtown from the declining textile industry. One hollow hulk of brick, now called the Wyche Pavilion, remains along the river just west of Main Street. The place started out as a paint shop then was occupied by a mix of businesses over the years. It’s now an event venue, seldom used, a spooky contrast to the upscale hotels nearby.

We got coffee at Spill the Beans, which is open until 10 PM on weeknights. The wide space is street level, carved out of an old brick building, the brick walls left preserved, creating a cavernlike feel. After the heat the hypercooled air steals your breath. The pungent aroma of many coffees sweetens the place.

Devoted coffee drinkers like “Beans.” The front room looks out on Main Street. A few oils decorate the walls, vibrant colors of trees, floral arrangements, clowns, giving the space an exotic European feel. It was a late weekday summer afternoon, the city seemed half-asleep. Traffic was sparse, even on Main. A few folks sat at the far end of a large room to the rear. We sprawled on a sofa against the bricks.

The coffee was rich and good. The spicy bitterness brought cool moisture to my forehead. We savored the quiet. A couple of women, faces flushed with the heat, waited at the counter for their iced drinks. Others came and went. Parents bought ice cream cones for their perspiring children.

The idea, which comes with coffee, is taking stock, which always suits old people free of young kids and jobs. The oldsters have their medical appointments and their aches and pains to fill the conversational gaps. If they’re lucky they have their cruises and tours and grandkids to talk about. They have their memories.

We engage to a point, then put all that aside. The story of life really is in odd, offbeat but enduring things—at that moment, the dark, cool space and the coffee that distracts from hard details like doctors and pills. Distraction is what we hope for. While sipping I drift back to the Virginia mountains and the biting winter air, the rocks, the darkness. This is 15 years, or was it 16 years. There were the long training episodes in January, when Sandy made her vegetarian chili. The runners called her the “Chili Lady,” she served it and gave out seconds and thirds.

The medical things had moved along through various decision points when we drifted into this city. We fell into the program with the treatments, soon it was well in hand. For the second time I rang the radiation bell. We pushed the disease episodes away. We found our way around but never lost a sense of the rich moments of the past.

In that first winter we drove to Waynesville, 25 or so miles west of Asheville. We drank coffee there, too. Waynesville has remade itself as a tourist destination, Main Street was packed. We walked through the art galleries and browsed the Mast General Store. The “Gateway to the Smokies” is chilly in January. More than chilly.

The real win was the ride home along U.S. 276, which bisects downtown then meanders down through the Pisgah Mountains. Snow covered the peaks. We paused at Looking Glass Falls, a cold place in deep forest. Ice hung on branches above the falls, which curled into a fast-moving creek. I stood transfixed by the beauty of the place. We soldiered on through Brevard into South Carolina. Just past the town the hospital called, scheduling more tests.

The following year we drove again to Brevard just before Christmas. We stopped at Caesar’s Head State Park and walked the path that shows the Upstate mountain panorama from the Hawk Watch at 3,200 feet. Sassafras Mountain and Pinnacle come into view, deep-blue Lake Jocassee glitters 40 miles west.

Back at “Beans” we finished the drinks and stepped into the street. The sunbaked air collided with the caffeine, I wobbled a bit. We padded over the South Main bridge toward the downtown towers. It’s a jumbled view, a bank, some hotels, as Main Street turns north.

We are done with reminiscing for the day. My drugs were scheduled to arrive the next day, they came in a big Fedex truck. I walked out to the truck, the driver scanned the package. I lugged the box inside. It was well put together, 60 capsules, a 30-day supply, embedded in cardboard with instructions and a blood-pressure gauge.

We scanned the enclosed clinical trial reports and side-effects warnings: hypertension, coronary, liver, and kidney problems. Then: perforation of intestines; low blood calcium; bleeding; jawbone problems (osteonecrosis); “QT prolongation”; and reversible posterior leukoencephalopathy syndrome or RPLS.

We know about drug boilerplate, required full disclosure of risk of possible side effects. Outcomes may range from nightmarish to negligible, a headache, a cough, tiredness. Disease, and fighting disease, means risk. Physicians prescribe the drug, patients use it.

We talked, Sandy said no. I thought of our serene afternoon at Spill the Beans, free of drugs, symptoms, side effects, fear. I thought of the Alaska trip next month.

Sometimes we just back away.

This is one of those times. I repacked the shipment and placed it in a corner. I pulled out my stockpile of the old pills and looked ahead.

July 6, 2026

Lenvima and Balversa sound like towns in Italy. They may be. In the medical world they’re in a category called “antineoplastics,” which are used to treat cancer, also called chemotherapy. Balversa is the one I know. Oncologists call it erdafitinib. Lenvima also has a funny name, levantinib. Both are in pill form, taken orally.

We’re constantly learning. Right now Balversa is the past, Lenvima is the future, as far as it goes. The present is logistics, transitioning from the downtown Cancer Institute to a branch only ten minutes from our house and getting to know a new doctor. He’ll be replacing the guy who tackled my problem nearly six years ago and never stopped working for me.

Dr. Britt Bolemon is a prince who stands head-and-shoulders above the medical technocrats. Over those years he smiled, he listened, he taught. But as the Prisma health care system pushed the docs to herd patients through the building faster, around 15 minutes per consult, he decided that was not his medical vocation. He found the practice and the philosophy he believed in 30 miles down the interstate in Anderson. Saying goodbye was tough.

We think of cancer in broad-brush terms: breast, colorectal, stomach, lung, pancreatic, cervical, esophageal, others, which are categories of hundreds, even thousands of specific strains of disease. Smoking, environmental factors like exposure to harsh chemicals and industrial pollutants, radiation, prolonged sunlight, obesity, diet, are factors. But the real battle is fought at the cell/molecular level, where for mysterious reasons things sometimes go haywire. 

One outcome may be something the oncologists, who are scientists, call the FGFR3 mutation. This is where my cancer, thymic carcinoma, begins. After all those oncology appointments, the doc’s tutorials and briefings, the gene-level tissue analysis he ordered in 2021, we heard the message but only vaguely grasped it. The analysis helped him decide I should go with Balversa which, like some other chemotherapy drugs, attacks where gene mutations form, and where we really live our lives.

Through these six years we watched the scans. Thymic carcinoma originates in the thymus, in the center of the chest, and like other cancers may travel elsewhere. The “urothelial” cancer in my kidney in 2018 reappeared along my rib cage in 2020. In November of that year when we landed in this town, Dr. Bolemon took charge. A week before Christmas surgery did the job, backed up by radiation.

A recovery year sped past, followed by a year of immunotherapy with Keytruda, the famous drug advertised on the evening news shows. It didn’t help much. Things lurched backward a bit. We talked about Balversa. In February 2024 I gulped down the first pill. I pushed the start date a day or two later to avoid side effects on my birthday.

A year passed in a blur of strange symptoms, numbness in my fingers, sensitivity to light, tiredness, similar things.  But soon the scans looked better and the doc cut the dosage from eight milligrams to six. Finally a thumbs-up, he called off the medicine, I took my drug holiday. Meanwhile the drug company kept sending pills, a 30-day supply every other week. I built up a stockpile. I waited a few weeks before canceling the deliveries, just in case.

But cancer doesn’t quit, those eerie shadows on the scans didn’t go away. “Let’s look at a PET,” the doc said. I got the PET scan at the downtown hospital. He studied the images. “Start back with three milligrams,” he said. I pulled the remaining Balversa bottles down from the kitchen cabinet, about six months’ supply. One tiny pill each morning.

Compared to the original eight-milligram dose, three doesn’t seem like much. Maybe it should have worked, maybe more would have worked. Three milligrams minimizes side effects, I never felt a thing. I went to the gym, jogged, took naps. For a year the scans looked good, those dark shadows fluttering around just a bit, growing a centimeter or two.

But then, two consecutive scans showed change. After the first the doc said simply, “It’s a stable scan.” But he could see, we all could see, this is a trend.

The late-June scan showed more growth. “Nothing remarkable,” he wrote in his notes, “but this combination warrants a change in therapy.” Cancer adjusts. Increasing the Balversa dosage probably wouldn’t have helped.

A first thought was a biopsy and another molecular study. Instead the doc proposed moving to Lenvima for four weeks to check tolerance, then a lab workup. He’s recommending 20 milligrams/day, a stiff jump from the three with Balversa.

Twenty milligrams of chemotherapy means business. Chemo targets fast-multiplying cells, cancerous or healthy, which could mean only hair loss, but possibly attacks on internal parts.  Depending on how the lesions behave after being hammered by Lenvima for ten weeks, the new doctor may order the biopsy and tissue study.

We kept up the rituals, exercising, getting coffee at our local place and, after ditching the road-trip idea, buying plane tickets to Idaho Falls for Kathleen’s and Steve’s September wedding party. We’ll get a car and drive to the site in Ashton.

Memories percolate back. Fifteen years ago we passed through Ashton, barely noticing it, on a road trip from Breckenridge, Colorado to Ennis, Montana. Maybe 20 miles farther north the highway divides into ID 87, which continues north through big-ranch country to Montana, and U.S. 20, which takes you to the west gate of Yellowstone National Park. We’ve gone both ways.  

So we have that. That follows our two-week expedition to Alaska in mid-August, a train, bus, and boat ride from Fairbanks to Vancouver. We’ll take photos, pick up souvenirs. More grist for “On the Road.”

Starting eight years ago, our plan was to see the country. We’re down to four states we’ve never set foot in, the Alaska trip will leave three, Arkansas, Oregon, and for Sandy, North Dakota. That would be nice. We’ll whisper a short prayer. The Lenvima is in the mail.   

June 29, 2026

Airfares to Idaho Falls in September have risen, like fares to everywhere. The advice we hear is look on Tuesday—no, look on Wednesday. Try “Google Flights.” Try “Kayak.” Try combining flights with a car rental. Look on the airline websites. American flies there, Southwest doesn’t. How much for the extra checked bag, or for picking seats in advance?

Almost everyone who travels agrees that flying, on top of the cost, is often painful. We slept on an airport floor in Denver and didn’t enjoy it. I remember especially the after-hours cleaning crews with their high-powered vacuums. Years ago another flight from Chicago was delayed for hours, until after midnight, when President Obama visited his hometown.

The road trip idea looks interesting. Four years ago, in-mid June 2022, we drove to Sheridan, Wyoming, for the Bighorn trail run. That trip took four and one-half days, but we spent the third morning in Independence, Missouri, visiting the Truman Presidential Museum. We stopped in Badlands National Park for part of an afternoon.  On the last day we visited Mount Rushmore and Sturgis, South Dakota, site of the big motorcycle rally every August.

The actual destination now is Ashton, Idaho, for our youngest daughter’s and son-in-law’s wedding party (they eloped last year). Ashton is a little over 400 miles farther west than Sheridan. Google estimates just over 2,000 to Ashton. It routes you on I-80 through Nebraska, which we have never visited, instead of I-90 through South Dakota, which we took in ’22.

Running the numbers, or the routes, we note that I-90 beyond Sheridan would force you onto winding rural roads across Wyoming. I-80 gets you farther west in Wyoming before you have to take a state road, U.S. 191.

It looks like an adventure. It was one, for sure, in 2022. We camped out the first night in Massac State Park, in Metropolis, Illinois, just across the Ohio River from Paducah. That ended a long day, nearly 500 miles of driving. I was tired slogging across Tennessee and Kentucky. We had a nice campsite at the park, it was a warm, comfortable evening. We walked, stretching our legs, and looked out at the wide Ohio.

I wanted to see Metropolis, the hometown of Superman. We saw the billboard on the outskirts, but didn’t do the tour. Instead we pushed forward on I-24 to I-57 to I-64 into St. Louis, then plodded across the hot, dusty center of Missouri on I-70. I had marked a campground in Blue Springs, just east of Kansas City. The place was hard to find, the campsite was on a slope. We cooked dinner and turned in. At 5:00 AM thunder boomed, lightened cracked, rain poured. We threw our drenched gear in the van and bolted.

We got breakfast at Starbucks and stopped at a park to repack. Luckily we found the Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Truman’s hometown, and spent a morning at that truly unique place. Then it was I-29 out of Kansas City.

Here the trip turned into work, as you venture into the official Midwest. Miles and miles pass leaving no impressions. The interstate plods on into Iowa, which has a nice “welcome” sign. We passed through a blur of places, then detoured into and out of Omaha without stopping. The highway crosses into South Dakota at Sioux City. It was flat, it was hot. We dropped the camping idea and got a hotel room in Sioux Falls. We had dinner at a sports bar, like any other sports bar.

We left early for the straight shot west across South Dakota, a sea of wheat and pastures. We paused for a walk at Mitchell, home of Sen. George McGovern, 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, then pushed on to Badlands, an amazing place that took a couple of hours. In another hundred miles we found the Black Hills campsite. A roaring wind capsized our tent, we spent a freezing night in the van, then headed out early.

After Mount Rushmore and Sturgis, we made Sheridan about 5:00 PM, beat and bleary-eyed. Pulling into the hotel, the odometer showed an even 2,000 miles.

One hard-to-remember problem when planning a road-trip adventure is that you have to drive back. We broke up the return by visiting daughter Kathleen in Colorado Springs, a solid 500 miles of prairie. Two days later we shot into Kansas. After camping at Lake Wilson, we visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene—a must-see—then drove through hours of rain to Columbia, Missouri. Then it was St. Louis again, then across Illinois into Indiana.

We somehow detoured into Evansville, then eventually retraced our course through Kentucky and Nashville and got a campsite near Crossville off I-40. We finished that second-last day with dinner at a Ruby Tuesday’s. Five more hours of interstates got us home.

Right now, airfares are not budging from around $800 round trip before buying seats, etc. This is with a layover, then a car rental, plus the risk of flights being delayed or canceled. Storms are common along the South Carolina-Idaho flight paths in September.

The van performed well on the trip to Alabama. It’s been around the territory, dozens of trips to Tennessee, Virginia a bunch of times, Florida five times, New Jersey, all over North Carolina and Georgia; the big one to Las Vegas in 2018, when I started writing “On the Road” as a travel journal.

It’s still pretty good on gas. But gas and meals and hotels for four days add up. Or you buy plane tickets and rent a car. But then, really, the choice isn’t important. It’s our daughter’s and son-in-law’s party, a positive, happy thing.

It’s a big country. Those adventurous road miles become long. Creating memories of never-before-seen and never-to-see-again places weighs heavily as you stare at lonely interstate lanes that stretch to the horizon.

The long-distance driver, holding the wheel, watching traffic and looking for the next rest area, may enter something like a meditative state in which the past and the future merge, maybe creating wondrous, mystical insights about life, love, family. Regrets and sadness may rush back. The mind frees itself to confront the unknown, to learn from it, to remember.  And really, what’s beyond the next turn. Maybe that’s the allure of it. Right now, we’re still looking at flights.