This week my employers, my staff, my family and I agreed that I would stay on another year in Honduras. The project is doing well. Although it is a huge challenge – the most difficult of my career – the team is talented and dedicated, and we are making solid progress. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, we held a retreat for about a dozen program experts to ensure we close out the year strong and meet our targets by the end of September.

My employers, staff and I also agreed that I would reduce my work hours, take time off, and hand-off some of the more stressful assignments to my deputy, who is much better at them anyway.

There has been, however, a change of plans. Instead of riding from Panama City Beach, Florida, to St. Augustine and back, I decided to check something off my bucket list: A bike trip from Bloomington, Indiana, to Panama City Beach. On Monday, I will meet one daughter, Tellie, in Florida before she flies to Honduras, and ride back to Indiana from Florida with Helen (my oldest daughter) and her sons after spending a few days on the beach. Like most of you, I absolutely love my time with the kids and grandkids.

Yesterday, I completed the bulk of my pending work assignments, took the two little grandkids who live with us to the park and walked a mile or so while they played. When we got home, I started arranging things for the trip: downloading my wife’s photos from previous trips in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Ecuador from the GoPro camera to her laptop, packing a few critical items, digging out keys for vehicles and storage (where I have my bike), making reservations and starting to plan the trip. Typically when planning a trip, I focus on the distances between stops along the most direct route possible. I prefer to ride about 40 miles per day. But the availability of accommodations really drives the route. If there are no rooms within 50 miles or so, then I have to rethink the route. But this year, there is another important variable that I must factor in: Elevation. The hills and foothills from Kentucky to Alabama are daunting. I have never attempted anything like this.

A feature on Google Maps makes it a little easy to chart out a course by providing detailed elevations along the entire route. You can run your cursor over the route and see how high the hills will be. Some rise as high as 1200 feet above sea level, and as much as 500 feet in one day. So, I can identify and to some degree avoid, larger hills. Last night, I got about halfway through the mapping exercise before I realized I was ignoring the kids who wanted to watch Dr. Strange, so I suspended the search.

At 2:30 a.m, I found myself wide awake. That rarely happens to me, but I had a lot on my mind. I made coffee, fed the cats, cleaned out the litter box and resumed the search.

This trip will prove to be the most challenging yet. For one thing, I am ashamed to say, I am still about ten pounds over my biking weight. Second, the distance will reach nearly 800 miles, about 50 miles longer than last year’s trip. I also have a deadline this year. I am racing against the calendar. I have to catch a flight back to Honduras, so I need to increase each daily trip by 5-10 miles. If you add the hills and foothills and the excessive heat this year, I realize this is my greatest physical challenge to date. And if I am honest with myself, I don’t know if I am up to the task at the age of 62.

On the other hand, considering the uncertainty of the prostate cancer, I feel I must push myself to attempt the trip this summer while I still am healthy enough to do it. We never know what the fall might bring. Or the following year, right?

While this was one of my most challenging years ever, it was also one of the most rewarding ones. Last September, I learned for the first time that I had a daughter, Anna, and a granddaughter who live in Indiana. A couple hours after learning this, I called her. We talked for a few awkward minutes, and right before we hung up, I said, “I love you.” She laughed and said something like, “Thank you.”

I don’t know why I said it. Except that it was spontaneous. It was genuine. And it was true.

We have chatted nearly every day since then. I met Anna and my granddaughter in person for the first-time last December. And they came twice to see me in Florida during the three-month period of cancer diagnoses, biopsies and testing. These girls are amazing. Beautiful. Funny. Intelligent.

After losing a toddler many years ago to pneumococcal meningitis, I felt that Anna and her daughter were gifts from God. Blessings like this do not happen very often, so you must embrace them when they do, right? I never thought about the years I had missed, only about the blessing I now have.

Even when I was grappling with the cancer diagnosis, trying to process it all, I was so grateful that I had lived long enough to get to know both of them. Come what may.

So now, this change of plans allows me to visit these three daughters and the grandchildren, see cousins, my father, and my aunt and her family. I will check off a box on my bucket list and see some of the most beautiful back roads and countryside that the United States has to offer. I have visited or lived in about 45 different countries, but there is no more beautiful place on earth than southern Indiana in the spring and summer.