In about three weeks, I am going to drive to a parking lot near Dallas-Fort Worth airport, park my truck and then get ready to board an airplane for a lengthy flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

I will land eventually at Eleftherios Venizelos airport in Athens and will begin 10 days of total relaxation in my ancestral homeland. I will stay in a bed and breakfast place near the Acropolis. Then I get on the metro train bound for the port city of Pireaus, where I will board a ferry for a five-hour ride across the Aegean Sea to Noxos, an island resort.

I will meet my cousin and her grown son in Greece, and we will bask in the late-summer Mediterranean heat.

I also will carry with me the memory of someone who once told me that of all the 20 or so countries she had seen, Greece is the only place that she could “visit over and over and over again.”

My beloved bride Kathy Anne traveled to Greece twice with me, in 2000 and 2001; I made a third trip there in 2003, but traveled by myself. All three of those earlier visits were media trips, at the invitation of the Greek press ministry. This fourth visit will be strictly to relax and to do damn near nothing during my entire stay in the country.

I will have plenty of down time, plenty of time to be alone with my thoughts., And you are entitled to bet every penny in the piggy bank that those thoughts likely will involve my bride, who I lost to cancer in February 2023.

I am happy to report, though, that my thoughts won’t bring heaviness to my heart. They will bring back memories of the glorious time my bride and I spent together looking at the antiquities, enjoying the food and pinching ourselves at the thought that we were able to see these sites together.

Do I miss her? Of course I do! I am resolute, though, in pursuing my life as she wanted me to do. “Life is for the living,” Kathy Anne told me. Take this to the bank: I can think of nowhere else I would rather be than the middle of Aegean Sea.