Adventures After Grief: A Widower’s Travel Tales

Almost two years (20 months) ago, I became a member of the club nobody ever wanted to join, when my beloved wife of 49 years died from Glioblastoma, an aggressive, incurable brain tumor. I then became a widower. I will not be discussing the miserable 11 months my wife suffered through until she passed, nor am I going to cover my journey through the wilderness of grief. This blog will focus on how I’ve learned to cope with all this unwanted change, and began to move my life forward through something my wife and I both enjoyed – traveling to new places, and new adventures. I’ll try to keep this light and somewhat amusing as best I can.

During our 49 years together, my wife and I rarely if ever planned major vacations, but we somehow managed to spontaneously wind up in strange places, sometimes domestic and occasionally in foreign lands. We were both working on graduate degrees in Geology when we met, and therefore were used to scrambling around in the dirt and mud in various locations throughout the US (me more so than my wife). I had already built a reputation on field trips for doing stupid, dangerous things (sliding down glaciers without an ice axe in the Tetons), but she married me anyway.

As we progressed in our careers, we discovered the joy of sleeping in hotels instead of tents, and began venturing out on more significant vacations in Mexico and Hawaii. My wife’s work as a geophysicist afforded her the opportunities for working with a seismic crew in the North Sea. My travels were much more mundane working in Information Technology, at least early on.

As we moved on with our lives, work brought us to more interesting places which became vacation spots as well – Australia, the UK, Ireland. Hawaii became a regular vacations for us, and we ventured into tennis related travel as well. Italy became a favorite place for us – especially for food and wine. After we were both retired, my wife became a certified scuba diver and we started on a new set of adventures, including a Bull Shark dive in Fiji. 

We had so many plans now that we were settled into retired life, which included travel in Northern Africa, Europe, maybe an African safari and who knows where else. And then our world exploded. My wife was quite adamant that I continue to travel and enjoy life when she was gone. It was hard to imagine going anywhere without her, but after coming out of shock, I started by visiting friends in Colorado and doing some hiking in the mountains. I followed that up with my first real adventure – a National Geographic/Lindblad expedition trip to the Galapagos Islands. That was a true test for me – being on a ship with 84 perfect strangers. That’s not easy for an introvert – that first dinner, going up to a table and asking if I could join them was really hard. But I survived. After passing that test, I have continued to book interesting (and some strange) trips, and continue to browse through piles of touring company catalogs. I have always loved being out in the wild, and this couples well with my main hobby – photography.

So, what can you expect from this blog – first of all, a lot of photos, my ramblings about the places I visit, a snarky comment or two about current events once in a while, and maybe a reference or two about my past life, with my soul mate. No matter where I go, she’s with me. 

One more point – I’ll be adding posts based on the trips I have been on since my wife passed in April of 2024, and will continue to post on future trips once I have that content writen. I intend for this to be another one of my hobbies.

I also hope I can learn how to improve my skills using WordPress over time – I suck at Web design. Please bear with me – it will improve.

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And if you want understand why the URL is Traveling + Widower, the button below will give you some understanding

If you are interested in my ongoing thoughts on grief (I try not to post on that), I’ve started a journal on the page below – I simply append new entries to the page, so subscribers will not be notified. The button below will start you at the beginning, but there is a table of contents which has links to each entry.

And something new! Click below if you want to just view photos. It’s a work in progress, but my intent is to have a separate gallery page for each adventure, and maybe a “Best of” gallery as well. I was considering using links to my Google Photos library, but removed that since it was just duplicating the galleries.