The Summer Trip

The Summer Trip is Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen’s name for their recurring summer journeys and the private tradition that gives their friendship a shape across changing circumstances. What begins as a longed-for break from school becomes a promise of future time together, a reminder of the friendship’s absence after their rupture, and finally part of a larger idea of home. Its significance lies not in any single destination but in the reliable possibility that, wherever the year takes them, they will find their way back to traveling together.

A Name for Anticipation

The phrase first gathers meaning in the months before a trip is planned. Poppy recalls that she and Alex used it in messages throughout the year, often before they knew where they would go or how they could pay for it. Their correspondence made the trip an anticipated shared future rather than a fixed itinerary: school could feel interminable, while summer remained something they could look forward to together. The name’s simplicity is part of its intimacy. It did not need a destination to be recognizable to them.

The imagined trip could enter even casual exchanges. Poppy remembers proposing a Summer Trip uniform with a screenshot of a T-shirt declaring that breasts were real, or exceptionally short overall shorts. The joke makes the tradition feel both ordinary and particular to the two of them: it could be invoked through a silly outfit idea just as readily as through a serious plan. The phrase carried the ease of a shared language, one that could make the coming trip present before it had been arranged.

That anticipation also acquired a practical foundation. When Alex was already devoted to his classes and considering graduate programs in English, while Poppy was struggling through college with straight Cs, he offered to keep his summer breaks open for her. They shook hands on the promise and grinned as if they had signed a consequential contract. The commitment did not specify a destination or guarantee they could afford every possibility. Its force was that Alex would preserve the time: summers could remain open for the two of them to go somewhere they could manage.

The Tradition Under Strain

The trips became a measure of what Poppy missed when the friendship fractured. After the Croatia trip, her online travel writing dwindled. When she later reread her post about Croatia, she could see how miserable she had been after returning home, even though she had removed every hint of Alex and of what had happened. The contrast between that polished trip and her account of the older tradition sharpened the distinction: the Summer Trip was not valuable simply because it was travel, and a costly holiday could not guarantee the closeness they had once brought to their journeys.

For two years Poppy wanted to ask Alex to give their friendship another chance, but fear of his answer kept her from asking. The absence of a question had not restored the friendship, and she missed Alex, their former way of being together, and the Summer Trip itself. Asking whether he was free before school began and suggesting a trip was therefore more than a travel invitation. It was a concrete attempt to discover whether the bond could be resumed. The trip offered a reason to meet again without making the answer to their larger question certain in advance.

When the possibility of traveling together returned, Poppy worried about the cost. Her savings could not stretch to the sort of trip affordable on R+R’s budget, and she doubted Alex could comfortably split those expenses on a high-school English teacher’s salary while carrying the debt associated with his doctorate. She also suspected he might refuse if he knew she was paying. Instead of treating limited means as an obstacle to the tradition, she reinterpreted them as a route back to its earlier form: their inexpensive, improvised trips had been fun, and the deterioration had begun only after R+R became involved in their summers.

That reasoning shaped her proposal for Palm Springs. She wanted to see the place as an impoverished academic and a digital-age journalist, without professional photographers trailing them or five-star restaurants defining the experience. The choice recalled the trips they had cobbled together on cents and offered a deliberate contrast to the luxury of the Croatia journey. The Desert Rose apartment complex—with its bubblegum-pink stucco, cactus garden, white picket fence, and teal pool—provided a setting for this return, but even its studio layout, a single open room with no door except the bathroom, made their renewed closeness awkward. The old tradition could be attempted again; it could not make the two of them instantly unselfconscious.

Distance, Reassurance, and the What-If

The phrase remained important when their lives carried them apart. After Alex finished college and prepared to begin an MFA in creative writing at Indiana University, Poppy tried to tell herself that the distance would not be great and that they would soon live closer than they had since she dropped out. Their plans for the next meeting nevertheless relied on the Summer Trip. During a later visit, they considered whether they might see each other at Thanksgiving or Christmas, but those possibilities were uncertain; the Summer Trip was the obvious plan. Alex joked that, if nothing else, they would always have it. Poppy had to make an active choice to find comfort in the remark, because a promise of one annual journey also called attention to all the time they spent apart.

The tradition was not insulated from romantic complications. In New Orleans, Poppy wondered whether she might be as happy there as in New York, and whether Alex might visit more often if she lived there. At the same time, she was happy with Guillermo and believed the tension represented by the friendship’s five-to-fifteen-percent what-if had been resolved. The Summer Trip could preserve a uniquely close friendship without requiring that its unspoken possibility be acted upon. But the uncertainty remained consequential: when Alex asked what to do about inviting his girlfriend, Poppy raised the possibility, and he said he did not think it was a good idea. The trip belonged to a shared space whose boundaries could not be settled simply by calling it a friendship tradition.

Years later, the emotional stakes surface in a small exchange about whether Alex might cancel. Poppy admits that she keeps getting nervous he will do so. Alex tells her that the Summer Trip is the highlight of his year; when she asks whether he is tired of travel, she insists she could never tire of it and tells him not to cancel. His already packed suitcase contains a book by Flannery O’Connor, and Poppy calls the determined little figure on it a tiny fighter. The moment joins practical preparation to reassurance: the trip is still planned, but the possibility of losing it has become something Poppy needs Alex to address directly.

From Escape to a Shared Life

The meaning of the tradition changes when travel no longer has to stand in for all the time they can spend together. When Alex lives in New York full-time and Poppy meets him at Cafe Lalo, they skip part of a tour to sit where Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks had sat in You’ve Got Mail. Blossoms move through the cold city as they drink cappuccinos, and Poppy recognizes a kind of pleasure she had not known was possible: life can feel like a vacation one does not have to leave. Yet this is not a claim that ordinary life has become effortless. Alex works on writing, grading, and lesson plans; Poppy sees him briefly on weekday mornings; laundry, dishes, taxes, dentist appointments, and lost MetroCards fill their days. The contrast gives the old journeys a new context: the shared life contains chores as well as travel, and their intimacy persists in both.

Their future plans retain the outward form of the tradition while widening its purpose. They intend to spend four days in Norway and four in Sweden, forgoing the Icehotel because they are a teacher and a writer without the money for it. After Sweden, they will fly directly to Linfield for the rest of Alex’s summer break. Poppy will leave a key with Rachel to water the plants; in Linfield, they will stay in Betty’s house while Alex fixes it up. Poppy imagines sitting on the floor with Twizzlers, finding ways to make him blush, and helping tear down wallpaper and choose paint colors. Their plans also include diet soda at dinner with Alex’s father, brothers, nieces, and nephew, and time on the porch with Poppy’s parents overlooking the remains of the Wright family car lot.

The Summer Trip thus comes to include more than departure and return. Poppy and Alex plan to try on their hometown together, just as they have been trying on New York, and see where they want to be. The itinerary does not erase the distinction between travel and domestic life; it carries them from one into the other. By the end, Poppy already knows the answer to the question of where she will feel happiest: wherever Alex is will be her favorite place. The phrase that once named a hoped-for break from school has become part of a deeper assurance. Its enduring destination is not a particular city but a life in which being together no longer depends on waiting for summer.