My husband Brock is due to have his IV cancer treatments every two weeks, but instead we decide to get our 1986 Ford Frontier motorhome into shape and drive it across the country.

The mechanics at Kroffat Automotive are astonished. “I thought she’d leave here for the wreckers,” says Mr. Kroffat himself. “But she’s in remarkable shape.”

Like the oncologist, after seeing the latest, terrible CT scans: “I can’t believe you’re feeling this well.” Amazed that the pain’s kept under control with a few Extra Strength Tylenols every couple of days.

Things that work: the air conditioning, the stove, the freezer and fridge.

Things that don’t work: the oven, the cassette tape player. His lungs, sometimes, with their infant tumours. That space where the first tumour’s regrown, where his left kidney used to be.

We take a week to prepare. I wipe away six years of dust from the blinds with a wet cloth, slat by slat. Brock replaces light bulbs and the ceiling vent handles. Isaac, our almost-three-year-old son, taps the walls with his plastic screwdriver and fills the cassette deck with toonies.

We’re thirty-six and thirty-seven years old, but our parents are anxious. My in-laws decide they’re coming with us: they’ll follow in their own motorhome. Brock makes the awkward phone call to tell them no. We promise ourselves to call them frequently, although it won’t be as often as they’d like. We’ll post pictures on Facebook. I’ll send postcards.

It’s May 31. We spend our first night at Goldstream Provincial Park: rainforest nirvana. I can’t believe I haven’t been here before, despite living on Vancouver Island for eighteen years. It’s the afternoon and Brock naps on the back bed. I lead Isaac to the playground. He circles the dirt track on his balance bike like a pro. I take videos for Brock.

The next morning, Brock has his IV treatment in Victoria. It’s a new miracle drug for kidney cancer patients. It could be water, for all the good it’s doing him. But this is the last option left, so we’ve continued. The odds of getting another treatment on the road are minuscule. Whatever.

Band-aid on Brock’s arm and we’re off: he drives to the ferry despite the risk of post-IV nausea, and we catch the 3 p.m. sailing to Horseshoe Bay. We’re officially heading east.

We expect to drive for four weeks, but we’ll be gone all of June and July. In the beginning, the thirty-year-old motorhome performs surprisingly well. Brock does almost all of the driving. He loves to drive. He loves to feel like he’s moving forward, the landscape always changing. Canada is the perfect country for this: rainforest to ocean to semi-desert to fruit stands to mountain ranges, and that’s just British Columbia. Sometimes I feel like we’re running away. Sometimes I pretend we won’t go home, ever. That Brock will no longer be sick, because we’ve left that behind.

We remember Brock’s cancer when we visit family and friends. “You look so good,” they say. Even then, no one wants to ask about it, so we dazzle them with anecdotes. The two young grizzly bears who strolled past our motorhome at the lookout in Kootenay National Park. The caribou cow that almost charged me and Isaac just south of Jasper. The Calgary Zoo, the CN Tower, Niagara Falls. The water parks in Osoyoos, Bobcaygeon, and everywhere else we can find one: Isaac loves water parks.

By the end of June we’ve been through Quebec and learned that “water park” in French is “jeux de l’eau.” We cross into New Brunswick, turn off for the tourist information centre, and when we return to the motorhome with our arms full of brochures she refuses to start.

This is one of three times she does this, and every time it’s unsettling. What will we do, if she never starts again? We’ve learned not to think too far ahead.

I make us tea on the stove and we resign ourselves to sleeping in the parking lot. But when we turn the key an hour later, the engine roars. Another fifteen minutes and we pull into our first Maritime town: Edmundston. We set up camp at Les Jardins De La Republique Provincial. The campground has hot showers, laundry, a swimming pool, ten geocaches and two playgrounds, which is good because this is where Brock crashes for the first time since we left home. He is queasy and exhausted on the bed in the back. I turn the air conditioning on and distract Isaac for three days while we wait for Brock to recover.

On the third day I decide that Edmundston is not the right place to be if Brock needs to fly home, so I fill up our two gas tanks and start driving. My boys sleep behind me. The Bluetooth speaker blasts an East Coast soundtrack. I belt out Home for a Rest and feel sick with love for New Brunswick. Some people long for Paris or Rome: I’ve always dreamed of exploring the Atlantic provinces behind a steering wheel. I want Brock to feel better so we can continue. I want to see Prince Edward Island. We haven’t decided yet if we’ll go to Newfoundland. I want to go to Newfoundland.

We reach Fredericton and Brock is almost human again. We spend Canada Day on a sandy beach and eat our first lobsters. Brock calls his parents while we walk under the Hopewell Rocks. We watch a movie and spend the night at a drive-in on Prince Edward Island. We stubbornly circumnavigate all of PEI, as if checking that box will make everything better. We take the six-hour ferry to Newfoundland.

Our motorhome is a miracle. Brock’s in worse shape. He gets sick again in Gros Morne National Park and sweats on his foam mattress for another three days. There’s no electricity so I park in the shade and take Isaac to the beach. He makes friends with Newfoundland families. A tourist tells me about the recreated Viking village a day’s drive away. “I touched an iceberg,” she says, and shows me pictures on her phone. A happy family of four. That night, Brock throws up and the sound carries through the campground.

I drive us north and see my first iceberg, Brock still asleep in the back. We have lunch at the only Tim Hortons in the world to serve iceberg donuts: blue icing with a swirl of white in the centre. Brock can barely eat soup. A local man with a complicated accent tells us where we can see the bergs that have stuck on the shore, but I get lost and settle for a viewpoint, and Brock sees his first iceberg. He takes one thousand pictures.

We camp in a post-apocalyptic forest, stunted trees and weathered rock. It is frigid cold and we pity the campers in tents. The next day we reach L’anse Aux Meadows. This is Brock’s favourite part of our trip. He has a thing about Vikings, it seems.

A week later we drive onboard a ferry and sail back across the Cabot Strait. This is a sixteen-hour sailing that banishes passengers from the vehicle decks, and we spend our first night in forty-nine days away from our motorhome, in a cabin with bunk beds and a hot shower.

It’s on this ferry that we decide to go home.

“My books,” says Brock.

I sigh: “Our bed.”

Brock drives as we cut across Nova Scotia, left unexplored, and back through New Brunswick. Somewhere in Quebec he’s no longer able to drive, and he has long naps in the back while I press the gas pedal through Ontario. I spot our first moose just east of Kenora and, although we’ve both been waiting for this, Brock is too tired to look out the window. I take one thousand pictures.

By Manitoba, the motorhome no longer has the power to climb hills without losing speed. We limp to a Walmart in Winnipeg. It takes us three days to find a mechanic with the skills, shop space and time to diagnose our motorhome. It’s too hot to camp without air conditioning and we stay at hotels. Brock spends as much time as possible in bed, sleeping. We feel helpless and trapped in Winnipeg, and I almost cry with relief when we’re finally referred to Carl on the third day. Carl tells us our engine has a cracked manifold: it’s been leaking exhaust this whole time. Fumes are trapped inside. “Didn’t you smell it?” he asks. No, not even with Brock’s sensitive nose. We’re lucky there wasn’t a fire. We’re lucky to have found Carl.

He drives us to a mall and spends his day cleaning out the engine. A band-aid solution that will get us home. I keep Isaac distracted by renting a fire truck shopping stroller. Brock throws up in the food court washroom and waits for Carl’s call in an uncomfortable chair under a skylight. Five hours later, Carl picks us up in our motorhome. He turns abruptly, hits a curb. We say nothing, too grateful to care. He undercharges us.

It’s evening but I drive us out of Winnipeg, sick of the city and desperate to prove our freedom. The motorhome roars.

Brock reclaims the driver’s seat in Saskatchewan. We cruise past neon yellow canola fields and I snap blurry pictures.

We take Alberta and British Columbia in turns. Brock does the big push and we make the last sailing from Tsawwassen. He and Isaac are asleep when I drive us off the ferry just before midnight. I stop for gas in Sidney and cruise the winding Trans-Canada over the Malahat, determined to sleep in my own bed tonight. We pull into Duncan: it’s almost 1 a.m., August 1. On the final roundabout before our road, I am certain we’ll get into an accident. What are the odds: sixty-one days of driving more than 21,000 kilometers, without a single vehicle accident? But we beat these odds. At the top of the hill I pull into our driveway.

I lift Isaac from his car seat, step carefully up the stairs and tuck his floppy limbs under his Star Wars quilt, back in his own bed in his own room. The space of our half-duplex seems decadent after the motorhome.

Brock is quiet under the blanket in the back, his breathing soft. I put my hand on his hip and whisper: “we’re home, if you’re awake and want to come in.” I expect him to stay here, his final night on the road. He wanted this trip. He stopped treatments for this trip. But he wakes himself up enough to climb the stairs to our room.

A bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol waits on his bedside table.

And here we go.

(This story was performed by Joy Emerson on the Stories Less Spoken podcast. Episode 7 aired March 15, 2021. To listen, go to Stories Less Spoken. “And Here We Go” starts at the 22 minute mark.)

(To read about my experience of having this story performed on a podcast, click here for “Memoir, misery lit or clickbait?“.)