Travel is always better together 🤝✈️ Invite your friends to Travala with your referral link! When they sign up and complete their first booking, you both earn $50 in Bitcoin for future adventures 😍 Invite your friends now 👉

I was glad to join the volunteers at Global Empowerment Mission to help put together relief packages headed to the Panhandle. Thank you to everyone giving their time to help our neighbors recover. Floridians always come together when it counts.

My aunt is 72. My uncle died eleven years ago. Last spring, she finally took the trip they had always planned together. The Grand Canyon. On her second night in Arizona, she collapsed in her hotel room. She woke up in a small hospital. Alone. She doesn't speak English. Nobody there spoke Japanese. She told me later she was more afraid of being alone than of being sick. Her night nurse was named Shelby. Mid-twenties. Tired eyes. Pink scrubs with cartoon cats on them. Shelby downloaded a translation app on her own phone. She typed one sentence and held it up. "You are safe. I am here all night." At 2 a.m., my aunt couldn't sleep. Shelby pulled a chair up to the bed. There was nothing left to say that the app could translate. So she just held my aunt's hand. At 7 a.m., her shift ended. She didn't leave. She stayed until the doctor came at 11. Off the clock. Then she went home, slept for three hours, and came back with a blanket from her own couch, because "the hospital ones are scratchy." My aunt is home now. She's fine. Last week, she told me something I didn't expect. Since my uncle's funeral, nobody had held her hand until she fell asleep. Not once in eleven years. Not until a stranger in Arizona, in pink scrubs with cartoon cats on them. There's a small piece of paper taped inside my aunt's kitchen cabinet now. Shelby had slipped it into her discharge papers. It's in Japanese. Google-translated. Two mistakes. It says: "You were never alone."

Without the love and support of the Cantor families, I could have never made it through the devastation of 9/11. They gave me the strength to rebuild over the last 25 years. Together always!