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WILLIAM FALLON: To the Shoreline of Kauai

 

When Kayla turned 6 in 1999, William and Laura Fallon decided it was all right to start taking long trips. The resulting trip to the Grand Canyon was Kayla's first long airplane ride and the first of a series of trips to national parks for the Fallons.

This year, they went on a sweeping 16-day trip that encompassed Grand Teton, Mount Rushmore, Rocky Mountain National Park, "and everyplace in between," Mrs. Fallon said. She and her husband had mapped the trip using an atlas to pick a principal destination, then figured out what other parks were nearby. They got back on Labor Day weekend, and Mr. Fallon returned to work at Cantor Fitzgerald.

"We went on roads we weren't even supposed to go on," Mrs. Fallon said, and recalled a prior trip she and her husband had taken to the island of Kauai in Hawaii, before they had Kayla or her older sister, Kathleen, who is 11. They followed a winding road past signs ordering them to turn around, all the way to where the beach ended at a rocky shoreline.

"We got great pleasure out of that," she said. "We went as far as we could."

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From "Profiles in Grief" of The New York Times