The AAA office was forty-five minutes from our town, which had a population of five hundred people and definitely no AAA office, much less a proper stoplight. My parents made the drive anyway, in the weeks before every summer, and came home with the Tripkit: a packet of strip maps that showed only the road we’d be on — turn by turn, nothing on either side — and a thick booklet listing hotels by state, each one rated by stars. My mother found the maps annoying. I loved them. I loved the booklet too, the way you could run your finger down a column of listings and imagine arriving somewhere. We were looking for two or three stars. We were looking for a pool.

I don’t remember when I became one of the navigators. Somewhere around ten or eleven, I think, old enough to hold a map, folded in sections without it taking over the whole backseat, old enough to announce exits and count miles out loud. My mother did the same from the passenger seat. My father drove. My brother, three years younger, had no interest in any of this and was content to exist beside me in his own world, whatever he was doing with his hands that hour.

My father’s eyes stayed on the road, and he had full control of the books on tape. Of Mice and Men is the only one I remember. I’m fairly sure he used those tapes to put me and my brother to sleep — it was highly effective — and it wasn’t just one tape per book. It was at least eight. Maybe twelve.

The trips happened every summer, organized around his other great love — stained glass. My father was devoted to the craft of it. It was his life – the small business he created, Advent Glass Works. He loved the making of it and the community, and the annual conference of the Stained Glass Association of America moved from city to city each year. That was the destination, the anchor. Everything else was the trip. We drove to it, always, in a car packed full, and my mother’s first priority in scoping out the hotel listings was a pool. Holiday Inn was reliable for this. We stayed in a lot of Holiday Inns.

I understood later that these summers were not cheap. There were years when the trip back home left no money for new school clothes in August. My father owned his small business, selling custom stained glass windows to churches – not a hot market, and one that occasionally turned a profit. My mother was a teacher, and her schedule was why summers worked — she was free. But the money was always tight, in the way that it is when one teacher and one stained glass artisan with a small business are raising two children in rural Florida. It was tight, and they went anyway. Or rather: he went anyway. The trip was not negotiable. The trip was the point.

I didn’t understand that at the time. I just knew we were going somewhere.

Toronto was 1985. I was twelve, which means my brother was nine. I remember the hotel was in a tall building surrounded by city blocks. I remember that the gala for the SGAA meeting that year was held at a castle. A castle, in Toronto. I remember standing on the balcony with my father — the rooftop, or something like it, an outdoor space high above the city — and I remember my father handing me his glass of champagne to taste.

Dom Pérignon. I didn’t know what that meant then. I know what it means now.

He gave it to me like it was normal, like of course a twelve-year-old should have a sip of champagne on a castle rooftop in Toronto, like the world contained experiences worth offering to your children before they were old enough to have earned them. I took a sip. I remember the bubbles more than the taste. I remember the feeling that something had been extended to me that I was not quite ready for and would spend years growing into.

My brother and I had breakfast alone that same trip, just the two of us, in the hotel restaurant. We ordered from a menu and signed the check to the room. I had never signed a check to a room. I wrote my last name very carefully, the way you do when you are pretending to be older than you are. I remember the waitress being very patient with us. I wonder now if she thought the scene was strange, wondered where our parents were.

The 1983 trip was six weeks. We drove to Palo Alto, then north to Seattle, then east across the country in a long arc home. Somewhere in Seattle, I watched salmon jumping in the locks. I tried lox for the first time, on a bagel, with cream cheese, and I remember the specific sensation of not being sure I liked it and deciding I did anyway.

We came home through Pennsylvania, through the Fourth of July. We ate Pizza Hut for dinner and I fell asleep in the tent after watching fireworks with my brother, visible only through a gap in the fabric door, bursts of light and noise and awe. My parents slept in our conversion van. And I remember that the tent was placed on uneven ground, and my brother and I both ended up having rolled to one side the next morning.

My father is gone now. He died in February 2014 — a sudden, devastating stroke, after the slower impact of dementia in the couple of years before it.

I don’t know exactly when I understood what those summers were. It wasn’t while I was in them. Maybe it was somewhere in medical school, watching what people hold onto when things get hard. Maybe it was later, in my own clinic, in rooms where people are making decisions about what they still have time for.

He wanted us to see that the world was bigger than where we lived. That was the whole thing. The Tripkit and the strip maps and the pool and the champagne on the rooftop and the lox and the salmon in the locks and fireworks through the gap in the tent — all of it was the same gesture, repeated for years, in every direction he could afford to drive us.

Look, he was saying. Look at what’s out there.

I have been looking ever since.

If you are new here: I am a gynecologic medical oncologist and the founder of MMarkham Travel, a luxury travel advisory. I write about time, and what we do with it, and occasionally about the specific and underrated pleasure of a very good hotel. I am glad you found this.

There is one conversation that prompted this entire thing — but in reality, there were many. This is an example of one of them.

It was late 2020. The vaccines had not yet arrived. My patient and I were both masked, sitting across from each other in the clinic the way we had learned to sit — close enough to hear each other, far enough apart to feel the particular distance that year required of everyone. No hugging, which was hard for both of us.

We were talking about the end of her life and of a decision about hospice.

She was not angry. She was not in obvious despair. She was reflective, in the way that people become when the future suddenly has a shape they can see clearly. And what she kept coming back to, in different ways throughout that conversation, was time. Not the time she was losing. The time she had already spent.

The trips she had meant to take. The summers that had passed without the celebration they deserved. The milestones — and the ordinary weeks, the unexpected days off, the small windows that had opened and then closed — that she had filed away under someday until someday was no longer available to her.

I have sat with a lot of patients in rooms like that one. I know that grief takes many forms. But the theme of that particular conversation and of others like it settled into me differently. Maybe because I had just returned from Paris — alone, for the first time, four days in January that I have written about here — and I understood in my body what it felt like to have actually gone, to have not waited. And because I also wondered, at that time in the pandemic when I worried that my work in medicine might lead to my early death, if it would be the last time.

Whatever the reason, I could not stop thinking about it.

I want to be careful here, because I am not drawing a simple lesson from a complicated human moment. My patient’s life was full and meaningful. The trips she didn’t take were one small part of a much larger story. I am not suggesting that travel is the measure of a life well spent.

But I am suggesting that deferral is. That the habit of saving things — experiences, celebrations, time with people we love in places that pull us out of the ordinary — for some better, less complicated, more deserving future moment is one of the quieter ways we lose time without realizing it.

Why save the champagne for the celebration? Isn’t each day the celebration?

I see this in my oncology clinic. I also see it in my inbox.

People who have been meaning to plan something for two or three years or longer. Couples who keep saying they’ll go for a significant anniversary — the 25th, the 30th — and then the date passes and it becomes the 35th. Families who want one last trip before the kids are fully grown, who keep waiting for the schedule to cooperate.

The schedule does not cooperate. It has never cooperated. It will not begin cooperating on its own. I know this from personal experience.

I started MMarkham Travel because I needed to be in this work. Not adjacent to it. Not recommending it from the outside. In it.

The Paris trip had shown me what travel could do for a person who had lost the thread back to herself. My patients had shown me what it looked like when someone ran out of chances to find it. And somewhere between those two things, I understood that helping people actually go — not someday, but this year, with intention and care and someone in their corner who knew what they were doing — was work I was supposed to be doing.

It is not lost on me that I am an oncologist who plans travel for a living. People find it surprising. I find it clarifying. The two things are not in tension. They are, for me, expressions of the same belief: that time is the only truly finite resource any of us have, and that what we do with it matters more than we tend to act like it does.

I am not trying to be morbid. I am being honest.

The trip you keep meaning to take is not going to plan itself. The special moment worth celebrating is this one. Right now. Today.

And the version of you that finally goes — that stands somewhere beautiful with the people you love, or alone with your own thoughts in a city that has no claim on you — that person does not regret going. In my years of doing this, I have never once heard someone say they wished they had waited longer.

If you are new here: I am a gynecologic medical oncologist and the founder of MMarkham Travel, a luxury travel advisory. I write about time, and what we do with it, and occasionally about the specific and underrated pleasure of a very good hotel. I am glad you found this.

And if something in this essay is sitting with you — if there is a trip you have been meaning to take — I would genuinely love to hear about it. You can find me at MMarkhamTravel.com, or simply reply to this.

On losing yourself, a bridge in Paris, and what it means to breathe again

I almost didn’t go.

The trip had been months in the planning — four days in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, alone, in January. A week before I was supposed to leave, the guilt arrived, as I perhaps should have expected it would. I was leaving my family. I had never traveled without them. Who does this? Who simply leaves?

I went anyway.

I want to be precise about what I was feeling in the months before that trip, because I think it will be familiar to many of you.

It was not burnout, exactly. It was not dissatisfaction. I was not in crisis. I felt at peace with who I was — as a mother, a wife, a physician, a daughter, a friend. I loved my work. I loved my life.

What I felt was something harder to name. I had become so many things to so many people that somewhere in the accumulated weight of all those roles, I had lost the thread back to myself. Not to any one version of myself, but to the center — the quiet, continuous person underneath all of it.

I was unlinked.

I think a lot of women know this feeling, even if they haven’t found the word for it. The way you can be fully present in every room you enter and somehow, slowly, become less present to yourself. The way the noise of a full life can drown out the one voice that most needs to be heard.

I needed to be alone. Not to escape my life, but to find my way back into it.

On my first morning in Paris, I was awake before sunrise. I dressed quietly in my hotel room on Rue Saint-Sulpice, stepped out into the cold January air, and began to walk.

The city was still. The streets of the sixth arrondissement were nearly empty, the light not yet fully decided on whether it was arriving or retreating. I made my way toward the Seine, stopping at a boulangerie that had just opened, and bought a pain au chocolat still warm from the oven.

I stood on one of the pedestrian bridges over the river and ate it as the sun came up.

I don’t have more dramatic words for what happened next than these: I could breathe. For the first time in longer than I could clearly remember, I felt as though I was standing at the center of something enormous and beautiful and utterly still. The light was coming up over the water. The city was waking around me. And I was simply there — not needed by anyone, not behind on anything, not performing any version of myself for any audience.

Just there.

It was, I would later understand, the feeling I had been searching for without knowing I was searching for it.

Two months later, the world closed.

I think about that often — the particular grace of having taken that trip when I did, without knowing what was coming. The borders would shut. The planes would stop. The life we had all assumed was simply waiting for us, on the other side of all our busyness, would be suspended in ways none of us had imagined.

For many people, the pandemic became the first real confrontation with what they had been deferring. With what they were saving their time for.

I had, by some stroke of luck or instinct, just had mine.

That four-day trip to Paris did not solve anything. It did not change my schedule or reduce the demands on my time or resolve the beautiful, complicated fullness of my life. What it did was remind me who I was when all of that fell away. And that, it turns out, is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the thing everything else depends on.

I share this not because I think everyone needs to book a solo trip to Paris — though I will say it has my full endorsement — but because I think many of us are living with that unlinked feeling and have not yet given ourselves permission to address it.

We keep waiting for the right moment. For the guilt to lift on its own. For someone to tell us it’s okay to go.

Consider this that.

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Time Well Spent… An introduction

There is a question I have carried with me for a long time.

It is not a complicated question. But it is one that most of us spend very little time actually answering.

What are you saving your time for?

Each week, I sit with patients who are grappling with diagnoses that have forever altered their life plan. People who, not long ago, had a future that looked more or less like they expected — and who are now being asked to reckon with it in ways they never anticipated.

What comes up, again and again, is not what you might expect. It is rarely about the hard things in medicine. It is about the life that exists outside of it.

The trip they kept meaning to take. The anniversary they were going to celebrate properly, someday. The summer they had planned to spend somewhere beautiful with people they love. The experiences they had quietly filed away under later — and who are now confronting what it means when later becomes uncertain.

There is also something else that emerges in those conversations. An urgency. A recalibration. A sudden, clarifying desire to fit in whatever travel experiences and memory-making they may have time left for — and to do it now, while they still can, while the people they love are still beside them.

I am an oncologist. I have spent nearly two decades in that room, holding that space. And I won’t pretend it hasn’t shaped me — the way I think about a calendar, the way I feel when a week passes without intention, the particular ache of a trip deferred indefinitely.

It is also what led me to travel, seriously and deliberately, and eventually to found a travel advisory built around the belief that a well-designed journey is worth the care it takes to plan one.

But this Substack is not about itineraries.

It is about something harder to name — the relationship between how we spend our time and who we become because of it. The way travel, at its best, doesn’t just take us somewhere. It returns us to ourselves.

I’ve been to places that quieted something in me I hadn’t realized was loud. I’ve watched light fall across a landscape and felt, briefly and completely, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I’ve sat at a table in a foreign city, unhurried, with people I love, and understood in a way I couldn’t quite articulate that this — this was worth protecting.

I started this newsletter because I wanted a place to think out loud about all of it.

Not just the where — though we’ll talk about that, too. But the why. The philosophy underneath the planning. The questions worth sitting with before you book the flight, before the calendar fills again, before another season passes quietly without anything in it that surprised you.

I don’t have tidy answers to offer. What I have is a particular way of seeing — shaped by medicine and by movement, by years of listening to what people regret and years of watching what lights them up.

If you’re here because you love to travel, I’m glad.

If you’re here because you’ve been meaning to take that trip and you’re not sure what you’re waiting for, I’m especially glad.

This is a space for both.

Time Well Spent publishes for those who believe that how we spend our days is, in the end, how we spend our lives.