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By Root 1280 0

Travel, our trusty travel agent for twenty years even though she lives a long way from us, in Salem, Oregon. We’ve never met her personally, and we don’t even know her last name, but a friend told us about her once as a resource and she and Bill became phone buddies who speak regularly in an arcane travel language only occasionally resembling English. In her biggest coup on our behalf, Ingrid convinced him a few years ago to purchase a Renault Mégane on a guaranteed buyback plan rather than renting a car in Europe, saving us bundles of money and giving us the pleasure of driving a vehicle with a distinctive and ample rear end advertised on French TV as suggestively sexy. She books us more conventional cars this time in Adelaide, Cape Town, and Nice, and all the flights except the ones in Brazil and South Africa, which Bill gets more cheaply himself on the Internet on discount airlines that sell internationally only through their Web sites.

As Bill deals with the reservations, Cheryl turns her attention to house-sitting arrangements, another major piece of nitty-gritty. A close colleague of Cheryl’s from years ago, when they both worked for the City of Dallas Arts Program, Diana Clark loves to visit Santa Fe and often stays at our place during long trips we take. This time she can come for the early and late stages of our absence. To handle the rest of the three months, Cheryl talks with a friend and neighbor, Diane Dotts, who happily agrees to stop by daily to check on everything. Both of them will pick up our mail and newspapers, throw away all the Christmas catalogs, and shred the glut of credit card offers from CapitalOne and other nuisance banks. Each will also pay a couple of bills, but Cheryl sets up almost all our regular expenses on automatic disbursement plans.

In the anxious final days of waiting for the return of our passports from the Brazilian consulate, we occupy ourselves with last-minute chores. Cheryl calls our credit-card companies to tell them exactly where we’ll be and when so their skittish security personnel won’t think aliens abducted our plastic for a burn-the-earth spending spree. Even when we’ve taken this precaution in the past, issuing banks have disrupted several vacations by calling our home phone and leaving urgent messages to contact them about possibly fraudulent charges in precisely the place we told them we would be.

Bill takes care of most of the housecleaning, as he usually does. Our place seldom gets more spick-and-span than right before we leave town in anticipation of Diana’s imminent arrival. You never know where a guest will stumble across a mess, so Bill puts on his obsessive face—always near at hand—and scours every surface, including those hidden under furniture and rugs.

Diana comes in the afternoon before our departure day, when we’re finally beginning to relax about the details, and the three of us catch up over dinner. She raises a question that other friends ask as well. “How will you manage to get along all that time, with the constant closeness and the strains of travel?”

Bill says, “Because I’m so good-natured.”

Ignoring him, Cheryl answers more seriously: “It’s pretty easy for us actually. For all of our marriage, as you know, we’ve worked and played together, often on long trips.” She pauses and updates figures in her head. “If you count revised editions as well as the originals, the two of us have collaborated fully on twenty-nine books, not something you want to attempt unless you’re pretty simpatico.”

Bill nods while thinking to himself, We’ll see.

The next morning, Mobi announces, as only a PDA can, “Around the World Trip—All Day Event.” Diana takes us to the Albuquerque airport after lunch and in the evening Cathay Pacific boards us in Los Angeles for the flight to Hong Kong, our connecting point for Bali. When the attendants in the Business Class cabin offer us a full multicourse dinner as we approach cruising altitude, Cheryl notices a lighter alternative on the menu, a bowl of noodles in broth, with sliced roast pork and greens, available at any hour.