This month brought travel opportunities that I had to decline. ALS TDI’s Leadership Summit in Boston takes place tomorrow, and many of my friends flew in for the occasion. But it seemed like too much for us. Planes, an uncomfortable travel wheelchair, the breathing machine, hotel rooms. All too complicated.

Later this month, many of my friends and family will gather at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, IL for the second annual Speed4Sarah concert and fundraiser. It seems that I should be there for that, but it’s actually been years since we traveled for Thanksgiving. Rob is allergic to holiday travel, in addition to penicillin and bees.

I used to love traveling. When I was fresh out of college, I got a job working for a travel publishing company in the San Francisco Bay Area. I wrote back cover copy for books about far-flung locales like Cuba, Oaxaca, and Wisconsin. I wrote press releases and designed postcards to market our various travel series. I was the traveling publicist for the author Rick Steves, whose Italy guidebook was, and maybe still is, the best-selling travel book in the United States.

It was my job to drive Rick to events and interviews. We got along well. He was impressed by my parallel parking abilities, I was impressed by his uninhibited love of Rod Stewart (including one particularly memorable late-night air guitar performance as we hurtled through Pasadena) and his ability to command attention before enormous crowds at speaking engagements.

Once when I was traveling with Rick in Vancouver and Victoria, I parlayed it into a birthday trip with Rob. It was November 2005 and, after I parted ways with Rick, Rob and I spent a few days exploring Vancouver. I remember that when we checked into our hotel room, there were strawberries and champagne.

That same month, I moved in with Rob in New York City. Two weeks later we flew to Paris for Thanksgiving, which obviously they don’t celebrate in Paris. Or in London, where we went next. In college I had lived in Paris, and I wanted to show Rob everything I loved about the city. But it was snowing and there was a strike on the train and I got sick and one night we ended up at a restaurant owned by Johnny Depp and none of it felt very Parisian. Rob says that I’m too negative about that trip and we had a lot of fun. I’m sure he’s right, but I was still counting on the chance to do it again.

I’ve been to Brazil, to Costa Rica, to Thailand. Mexico. Amsterdam. Spain. Italy. Germany. More. Traveling was always so important to me. I loved the feeling of touching down in an entirely different part of the world, hearing other languages, taking in the scent of a new city, figuring out where to get coffee. I thought that it would continue to be a big part of my life, and now the idea of flying across the country to Boston is overwhelming.

There are times when I contemplate the arc of my life as a traveler, and my concluding thought is that I absolutely have to get better, because there are so many places that I haven’t seen, and even the places I have seen that I want to see again. I’m ok with plane rides being stressful, as long as they’re stressful for the right reasons: delays, bathroom lines, broken TVs and tiny seats. I want jetlag and foreign food and that feeling when you find yourself in the ocean on the other side of the world and you think, I love my life. And then a cute British boy drifts past on a raft (pre-Rob), and you think, I love him, too.

But to start, I’d certainly settle for a road trip, my foot on the gas pedal, the dark highway extending before me, Maggie May coming through crystal clear on the radio.

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