With the scratch of wheels on tarmac in Sydney, everything changed. People scrambled into the aisles, as they always do the instant the captain turns off the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign, but Jen, Holly, and I stayed put. We all just looked at one another. This was it: the Last Stop.

During the year and a half leading up to the trip, and even for months after we’d left, I’d been convinced something would happen to keep us from completing the loop together. Amazing things like job offers, promotions, and marriage proposals. Scary things like health issues, canceled columns, or empty bank accounts. Even now, I couldn’t believe we’d come this far and grown closer than I’d ever imagined was possible back in New York.

Several of the backpackers we’d met had seemed shocked—maybe a little skeptical—that we’d actually remained friends throughout the whole trip. How had we traveled for this long without secretly plotting one another’s untimely travel-related demise? We’d explained that though our time together hadn’t exactly been fight-free, we’d made it work simply because the alternative was unacceptable. No single issue was so important that the three of us would be willing to throw away a friendship—or the chance to complete this journey together—for the sake of being right.

But there was another, more important reason we got along so well: The Checklist.

Right from the beginning, we’d secretly tallied all the stuff we’d sacrificed as individuals in order to keep the peace as a group. For months, none of us had mentioned the “credits” we’d get for giving up the bottom bunk or sitting in the seat next to the guy with obnoxious B.O., but we’d all kept score in our heads (knowing Jen, she used Excel charts).

“C’mon, guys, you know we all keep track,” Jen had finally pointed out in Vietnam. “And that’s fine. As an only child, I never understood how siblings could fight over stupid little stuff, like who got more juice or who got to ride shotgun, but now I totally get it.”

In some ways, we had reverted back to being kids. We’d been forced to share absolutely everything with one another—beds, bathrooms, train cars, battery chargers, breathing space—and still, we rarely wanted to separate. It wasn’t just because we adored one another’s company. We were all also worried we’d miss something really exciting if the other two went off without us for a day.

Of course, all of that togetherness could also be stifling. At times I battled the subconscious desire to compare my own behavior to Jen’s and Holly’s and the slightly paranoid feeling that the other two might be assessing me. The flaws that I’d worked carefully to conceal back home—the fact that I can be impatient, forgetful, and neurotic and have weird one-sided conversations in my sleep—were totally unhidable in such close proximity.

But, I soon realized, so were my friends’ slightly less lovable character traits. By being so involved in Jen’s and Holly’s everyday, uncensored lives, seeing the women they are in their amazing moments, average moments, and superlow, sleep-deprived moments, I finally understood the meaning of “nobody’s perfect.” And I mean that in the best way possible: appreciating their imperfections as parts of them made me realize that I could appreciate my own as parts of me.

The rest of the plane had emptied. And so the three of us finally disembarked from our last international flight before returning home. As we zigzagged our way through international arrivals, I started to imagine what my daily life would be like without Jen and Holly in it. Like it or not, the time was fast approaching when we’d be on our own again, making decisions and catapulting through the world without our two strongest lifelines to rely upon.

We’d no longer be The Lost Girls…we’d simply be ourselves.

Crossing the invisible line from the air-conditioned terminal into the warm, salty air of Oz, I felt enveloped with relief. We still had nearly two more months until that would happen.

The light was rapidly draining from the sky as we stood in the alley behind Travellers Auto Barn, staring at what looked like a space-hogging double-decker camper van on an acid trip. The whole vehicle had been shrink-wrapped in psychedelically tinted cellophane and emblazoned with more international landmark and sponsorship stickers than a stock car.

Holly and Jen had bumped into the promotions director for the Aussie-based World Nomads insurance company nearly eighteen months earlier at the Adventures in Travel Expo. They’d struck what sounded like an unbelievable deal: the company would provide all three of us with a year’s worth of travel insurance if we agreed to drive its fully loaded “Ambassador Van” during the seven and a half weeks we were in Australia, blogging about our experiences for the company Web site as we went. In addition to the free set of wheels, World Nomads would also hook us up with a brand-new laptop, a cell phone to stay in touch with our new bosses, and a special card that would guarantee us free Internet access in locations across Oz. The only catch? That there seemed to be no catch.

When Jen and Holly shook hands on the deal, all three of us were still in full-on multitasking New York mode. What World Nomads was asking us to do—blogging three times a week and posting video diaries on its site—seemed like a cakewalk. It wasn’t until we’d arrived in Sydney a year and a half and about fifty thousand miles later that we finally grasped the full scope of the task—and the machinery—that we’d agreed to take on.

“That’s the van?” Holly said as we all blinked hard at the hulking Day-Glo vehicle. “It’s just…so…big.”

Behind us, a man snorted in amusement. “Well, you know, I hear that all the time. After a few go-rounds, you’ll get used to it, I promise.”

The voice belonged to Chris Ford, the publicity rep for Travellers Auto Barn, a man who swallowed up what little alley space hadn’t already been commandeered by the van. At six feet, three inches, the guy was built like an army tank with a bulletproof chest and swollen arms where the heavy artillery should be. His comment barely fazed me. Just a day earlier, during a meeting with the World Nomads execs, the company’s sales director had asked if we planned to hold naked pillow fights inside the van during our travels—and if so, could we please videoconference him in so the whole office could watch us in action? My gaze immediately shifted to Christy, the one woman who worked with this motley crew of guys. She cracked a smile and let the comment slide, so we followed suit. We’d been in Sydney less than forty-eight hours, but I was already getting the impression that the post–Clarence Thomas era of political correctness we took for granted in the States had yet to be ushered in here.

Christy had given us instructions to pick up the van from Chris Ford at the Auto Barn and to e-mail them with the list of the Australian destinations we planned to visit.

“Where do you want us to go?” I’d asked her, anticipating getting on the road again. “We’re up for anything.”

“Anywhere you want,” Christy responded. “So long as you return the van in one piece, you can go across the outback to Perth and back for all we care. Actually, we’d probably prefer you do that—might make for better blog entries.”

“You mean we shouldn’t just stay here and drive it around Sydney till we go home?” Holly tossed out, half kidding.

It was the only time during our two-beer lunch that the executives didn’t laugh.

By the time Chris finished showing us around the van the next evening, the alley had gone almost completely dark. He briefly explained the Auto Barn rules of the road:

The oil and coolant must be topped off daily.

No riding in the back.

No picking up hitchhikers.

“That last one’s just for my own benefit. It’ll help me sleep better at night,” said Chris in a protective way that was kind of endearing.

And with that, we were ready to take off—except for one little problem.

“Hey, ladies, which one of you knows how to drive stick?” asked Holly.

I shook my head. I’d barely driven an automatic since college graduation and had never learned to use a stick shift. Jen unenthusiastically volunteered that she’d done it a few times as a teenager but had probably forgotten how by now. So the buck stopped with Holly, the one of us least inclined to operate electronics, machinery, or anything else sold with an instruction manual. Holly even turned to Jen or me when technical difficulties with her camera or iPod cropped up. But now, as the only one of us who’d ever gotten a basic stick shift education, she had to climb behind the wheel of the psychedelic aluminum beast.

Chris looked mildly apprehensive as he flipped the keys to Holly. “You guys signed all of your insurance forms, right?”

We assured him that we had. Holly gave him a thumbs-up, tentatively started the engine, and managed to stall only once as we pulled away.

Bosses, jobs, and attention-hogging vehicles weren’t the only responsibilities that we took on during our final months on the road. We also scored ourselves a two-month sublet with Simone, an Australian who’d used to date one of my ex-boyfriend Baker’s close friends, Jeff. I’d met Sim for the first time nearly two years earlier, after she’d sent me an out-of-the-blue e-mail asking if she and Jeff, who lived together in the Cayman Islands, could be “terribly cheeky” and ask to shack on my futon in New York when they came up for vacation.

I’d met Jeff only once or twice before, and was entirely unacquainted with his new girlfriend. Impressed by this chick’s ballsiness (and perhaps to show Baker that his friends still wanted to hang out with me even after we’d broken up), I not only prepared the futon for my houseguests but also planned an extensive weekend of dinners, parties, and social events for them. I knew almost instantly upon opening my front door that I’d love Simone. She was a gregarious, charismatic force of nature who’d spent the previous six years living in various glamorous locations around the globe. She was organized and pulled together in every way that I wasn’t and had a passion for travel that matched my own.

Over the next several months, I visited Simone and Jeff in the Cayman Islands and then again in Vegas for Simone’s twenty-seventh birthday. Though the couple split not long after our trip to Sin City, she and I stayed in constant e-mail contact, joking that if they’d done nothing else, we could thank our exes for bringing us together. And when she’d heard that our paths would cross again in Sydney, where she now lived, she wouldn’t hear of us staying anywhere else. “My flatmate will be moving out just as you arrive. It’s fated!”

When she offered to rent us the spare room in her apartment, where all three of us could sleep on a pair of air mattresses, we agreed to the deal straight away. Even through the rent was $1,000 per month (a staggering amount compared with what we’d been paying to sleep in Southeast Asia), we could justify splitting it. It would be cheaper—and infinitely more comfortable—than hopping between $30-per-night hostels in Sydney.

It wasn’t until we’d had the meeting with World Nomads’ execs that it dawned on me that we had a problem. If we paid Simone the two full months’ rent that we’d promised her and took full advantage of our living situation by sticking around Sydney, there would be no way we could make good on the assignment to drive and blog across Oz.

At this point, we all had a cash flow shortage. Holly was so far in the red that she’d almost turned magenta, Jen had depleted far more than she’d actually saved for the trip, and all three of us were depending on credit cards to bridge the financial gap. Writing a check to Simone and shelling out more cash to camp up and down the continent would push us way beyond our budgetary boundaries. At this rate, we wouldn’t even be able to afford our flights home.

Backing out on Simone wasn’t an option. She was counting on us to make her rent. But we couldn’t just give the van back to the World Nomads team either. Not for the first time, we were torn between settling into city life and our desire to hit the open road.

The longer we sat at Simone’s kitchen table trying to figure out the best course of action, the tenser things got between us. A low-grade level of stress radiated within our group. We tried to pretend that we weren’t completely freaked out by the fact that we’d somehow managed to take on a sublease, a massive vehicle only one of us could operate, an ongoing writing assignment, a cell phone, and yet another laptop two months before we’d even thought about reentering our “normal” lives—but we couldn’t.

Finally, after a few friction-filled days, we came to a compromise: we’d stay in Simone’s apartment for six weeks (but pay her for eight) and use World Nomads’ van to take long weekend trips to locations in New South Wales and one final road trip up to Byron Bay. It wasn’t ideal, but we’d just have to hope that our Pulitzer-worthy blogging skills could make up for the fact that we’d fall 2,030 kilometers short of Alice Springs (the unofficial capital of the Australian Outback) and a full 3,300 kilometers short of Perth.

I was disappointed that we’d come so far around the globe only to skip the continent’s most iconic sights, but there was an upside: once we made our decision to break up our Sydney stay with short road trips, everyone seemed to snap out of the funk we’d fallen into. Jen began organizing urban-based adventures with renewed vigor (“We can blog about the Sydney Harbor Bridge Climb, right?”), Holly jogged down to the Bondi Junction shopping center twenty minutes away to check the cost of gym memberships (“If we’re gonna be city girls again, we might as well take advantage of the amenities—plus, they’re offering a big discount this month”), and I did my best to track down which tourist offerings were authentically Australian.

One evening, after we’d finished a tour of the Sydney Opera House and passed row after row of souvenir shops selling Aboriginal art watches, boomerang key chains, stuffed koalas, and Crocodile Dundee hats, I suggested that we follow Simone’s advice to visit the famed Australian Heritage Hotel, a historic spot where you could order a pizza topped with kangaroo, saltwater crocodile, lamb, or emu. Holly couldn’t bear to sink her teeth into a formerly cuddly, antipodean version of Bambi. So instead we took our appetites over to Sushi Train, a restaurant where seaweed salad and four-piece rolls traveled past our outstretched hands on a giant conveyor belt.

It wasn’t exactly exotic or particularly Australian. But as I plucked a California roll and then a Boston roll off the revolving chuck wagon, I decided that for tonight at least, it was fine to have a taste of something familiar. Sydney was no longer just another destination we were visiting—for the next several weeks, it would be our home.

It wasn’t long after we’d hung the meager contents of our backpacks in the closets at Simone’s place that I started to notice that something was going on with Holly. I wasn’t sure what it was, but she wasn’t acting like herself.

Holly was one of the most laid-back, easygoing women I’d ever known, but by now I’d also learned that our eternal sunshine optimist was a still water whose emotions ran deep. Though she allowed the world to see her brilliant smile, her genuine kindness and compassion, she rarely shared the darker states of anger, depression, or disappointment. I knew she processed her feelings differently from Jen or me, who liked to talk and express and share until we’d exhausted our emotions (and those of everyone around us) and were ready to move on. It was only because I’d spent so much time with Hol in the past year that I recognized that she was going through something now. And I suspected that whatever it was had nothing to do with squeaky air mattresses or empty bank accounts.

Worried that she’d be missing out on our last weeks of freedom, I hoped she might feel like talking about it. I asked if she wanted to do the coastal walk from Bondi to Bronte. The 3.5-kilometer stretch between the two popular beaches is arguably the most spectacular in Sydney and, if the travel guides can be believed, one of the most picturesque in the world. Built in the 1930s as a government project, the path begins at the very top of Bondi’s surfer-packed white sand crescent and winds its way south through limestone cliffs overlooking the Tasman Sea.

The beach’s name comes from an aboriginal word that translates to “the sound of water breaking over rock.” The title certainly fit. Even as we walked, I could hear the waves crashing against the shoreline, filling huge saltwater lap pools built directly into the cliffs. They also provided just the right amount of curl for surfers trying to catch a break all the way back to the shore.

I knew that Holly loved this walk. She’d told me that she felt revived by the sun warming her face, uplifted by the sight of young families spreading picnic blankets along grassy spaces in the public parks. She even got a kick out of the small tent city some hippie had built along the shoreline back in the 1970s, which lives on to this day. Due to a weird government-zoning technicality, the guy couldn’t actually be kicked off the rocks. “Maybe we should ask to stay with him instead of paying rent at Simone’s,” Jen had joked the first day we’d all done the walk together. “He’s got a stellar waterfront view and zero overhead.”

Holly had been in great spirits then but was introspective now as we diverted from the path to check out the black-and-white photographs of lifeguards hanging in the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club.

Swimming and surfing along Australia’s 25,700 miles of coastline can be a risky endeavor—if strong currents or riptides don’t drag you out sea, you could get an excruciatingly painful hug or a deadly kiss from a box jellyfish—so the formation of lifesaving clubs became absolutely essential here. Many of the techniques still used to prevent drownings today spring from those developed by the men—and later women—who served in Australia’s lifesaving clubs.

As we walked past the turn-of-the-century portraits of cross-armed, serious-looking men in black-and-white candy-striped suits and matching skullcaps, I turned to Holly and casually mentioned that I thought she’d seemed a little distant lately. Was she doing okay?

Holly paused for several seconds to stare at one of the photos.

“Isn’t it weird how in all of the old portraits, the lifesavers look really stern, almost pissed off?” she said. “But in all of the modern ones, they look over-the-top happy, like they don’t have a care in the world?”

I peered at the photos and saw that Holly was right. The suntanned, red-and-canary-clad men and women from the current years looked as if they’d been splitting bottles of Prozac before every practice.

Simone had once told me that Australians adored the fact that outsiders viewed them as the happiest, best-adjusted people on Earth. Life down under, the world believed, was all about sunshine, surfing, shrimp on the barbie, and pursuing the endless summer. Nothing bad could happen in the magical land of Oz. “In reality, we have the exact same disappointments and heartbreaks that most people do,” she’d said. “We’re just better at hiding them than everyone else.”

That was the closest Simone had ever come to alluding to how devastated she’d been over her breakup with Jeff. It was only after arriving in Sydney and watching the vivacious woman I’d come to know close off as she drank red wine by herself on the porch every night that I started to understand the depth of her hurt. Whenever I went outside to talk with her about it, her entire facial expression and demeanor would change. She’d perk up immediately and insist that everything was “just gorgeous, darling! Really!” and explain that she was just exhausted from a long day at work.

I never really pressed Simone about her feelings—I felt that it might be too intrusive for someone I was still getting to know—but I knew I needed to try again with Holly. Her nonanswer told me that there was more going on underneath the surface than I’d originally guessed.

I waited until we’d hiked up the stairs that rose above the Bondi Icebergs Winter Swimming Club and made our way along the path to the sandstone cliffs at Mackenzie’s Point. From there we could take in the full sweeping curve of Bondi and catch our first glimpse of Bronte, a calmer spot a kilometer or so in the distance. This time Holly quietly confirmed that everything was okay—she’d just been feeling a little lonely lately, which, she hastened to explain, “has nothing to do with you or Jen.”

I knew I could be treading on awkward ground, but I took the conversation one step further and asked her about things back home—and had she talked with Elan lately? Jen and I had noticed that since she’d returned from Boston after the New Year, Holly had brought up his name in conversation less and less, other than to report the headlines about his latest audition or the movie he’d just started filming in Chicago.

“It’s just so tough with him on location and me not being able reach him on Skype,” Holly explained, saying that she got little more than static when she tried to call him using our laptop. “And with the time difference between Sydney and the States—we just haven’t had a really good, long conversation in a while.”

During the past few weeks—maybe even the last few months, she admitted—Holly had been wondering if she and Elan would ever really reconnect in the same way as they had when they’d first met. At times she’d felt more in sync with him than she’d ever thought it was possible to be with one person. Lately, though, they couldn’t even agree on a time to schedule a phone conversation.

I thought back to the morning before our initiation into the Maasai tribe in Kenya, when Holly had shyly admitted that she’d thought Elan might actually be the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. It was a powerful realization for her—she’d kind of assumed that she’d be one of those independent girls who might not get married until later in life—but after nearly four years together, they’d never had a solid conversation about marriage and kids.

That had shocked Jen and me (again, not an emotional stone was ever left unturned with the two of us), but I also understood Holly’s rationale. As a closet traditionalist, she wanted Elan to pursue her, to pin her down, to be the one to convince her to settle into adulthood at last. But thus far—he hadn’t. Like Holly had been at twenty-seven, he was focused primarily on achieving his own dreams and creative ambitions.

From what I knew of Elan, he was truly in love with Holly, so much so that he’d given her his full support when she’d decided to travel. I remembered when he’d proudly showed me the full-color map he’d purchased and mounted on tackboard in order to follow Holly’s route around the world. I’d told Holly just before we’d arrived in Sydney that I yearned for what she had: a loving, evolved relationship, a snug apartment, and a shared vision of the future.

Except that now, from what Holly was telling me, she wasn’t sure the last element in the equation was still in place anymore.

“Don’t worry, Hol,” I said, hugging her just before we walked down the steps to Bronte Beach. “Once you’re back in New York and under the same roof, you’ll get to know each other again. And you’ll fall in love all over again.”

I hoped that she’d agree or at least confirm that that’s what she wanted, but she fell silent again as we descended to sea level. Finally she turned and gave me one of her winning Holly smiles, the kind that usually convinced our friends that she was doing fine and, in fact, on top of the world. Except that by now, I’d gotten to know Holly a whole lot better than that.

Within a week of picking up the World Nomads van, we’d broken all three of Chris Ford’s rules. We hadn’t topped off the oil or coolant (none of us remembered how to). Because the front seat was built for two and an insanely tight fit with three, we all took turns hanging out on the couch in the back (“If we’re just driving on side streets, maybe it’s not a big deal?”). And we’d just slowed down to pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road during our first out-of-town excursion to the Blue Mountains.

Okay, Adam didn’t exactly qualify as a hitchhiker. Holly had met the tall, brawny firefighter in the airport on the way to Sydney, and he’d offered to give the three of us a tour of the national park just outside his hometown of Katoomba. Since he didn’t have a cell phone and insisted that it would be complicated to give us directions to his house, he’d made us agree to pick him up right on the side of the highway.

“Maybe this is how they save time in Australia?” Holly remarked as she slowed down near the drifter in washed-out cargo pants and a tight black tee who was waiting near one of the exits.

“Or he’s got a live-in girlfriend,” Jen said slyly.

“You were right—it’s absolutely impossible to miss this thing,” Adam said, laughing as he jumped in the back of our rolling billboard. As we got closer to our destination, he gave us the backstory on what we were about to see.

In 1788, a group of eleven ships nicknamed the First Fleet sailed from Great Britain to Australia with 1,400 people aboard, more than half of whom were convicts. A penal colony was established in what is now downtown Sydney. In order to deter the prisoners from trying to escape west through the Blue Mountains, a rumor was planted that the range encircling the settlement was completely impenetrable. For at least ten years, the story stuck—until a freed convict named John Wilson returned to Sydney to report that he’d found a way through the supposedly impassable mountains. Over the next decade or so, the government conducted several expeditions to confirm the best route through the mountains and on to the more fertile lands on the opposite side. Incredibly, just twenty-six years after the First Fleet landed in Sydney, convicts constructed a road that cut through the foothills in the same general direction we were headed now.

As Adam shared the history of the country where he’d grown up, I listened with the intensity of a kindergartner sitting in the front row at story hour. I’d always loved learning the backstory of the places that we visited, but there was something about Oz’s inauspicious beginnings that I found really compelling. So much about this young, rough-and-tumble country reminded me of my own.

Both the United States and Australia started out as British colonies that were still relatively unexplored at the time they were founded (at least by the settlers). They’re also staggeringly large, and the same pioneering, self-reliant spirit that drove American settlers to spread west all the way from Plymouth Rock to the Pacific was the same one that led Australians to throw down stakes in desolate, critter-infested outposts where no sane person should dare to tread. The early Aussie and American settlers had both pushed the boundaries of what was possible, taking a leap of faith—and oftentimes huge risks—in the hope of realizing some unknown reward. And though the journey that Jen, Holly, and I had just taken could hardly compare, I understood the mentality that had caused them to hit the trail in the first place.

I wasn’t ready for that journey to be over.

After our first few strategy sessions in Sydney, I’d learned that both of my friends were planning to return home in early June, just less than a year after our original start date. I knew that it probably made sense to book a plane ticket at the same time. But something told me that I needed to stay in Australia, for a few weeks at least, on my own.

It wasn’t that I craved solitude or wanted to be here without my friends. Exactly the opposite was true. I couldn’t bear the thought of saying good-bye to them, helping them hoist their backpacks one last time before watching them disappear into the terminal. It’s just that I felt that the personal journey I’d taken this year wouldn’t truly be finished, and the lessons of the trip fully realized, until I’d handed off the laptop to Jen and Holly and struck out on the road alone.

Did the idea of being as far away from home as possible with no assignments to frame my day and no professional mission to accomplish still scare me? Not nearly as much as it would have the year before we left. Actually, a part of me couldn’t wait to see what happened when I traveled without an itinerary, a goal, or a backup plan. Once that happened, it would be just me and me, kid—no distractions.

When Jen and I had traveled to Europe after college, my father had tried convincing me to stick around the continent as long as my budget would hold out. I refused, 100 percent sure that “all the good jobs would be gone” if I didn’t scramble to New York by the time summer got under way. Now, seven years later, I didn’t want to make that same mistake again.

We left the van behind and followed Adam’s lead to Echo Point, a viewing platform perched several thousand feet above the floor of the Jamison Valley. The three of us had taken in some pretty stunning landscapes during our trip, but something about this one rendered all three of us silent—for a few minutes anyway. I started to reach for my camera and then thought better of it as I stepped toward the railing to soak in the scene. Capturing the full scope of the panorama—the velvety ripples of forest tumbling across hundreds of thousands of acres of low mountain foothills—would have been impossible anyway.

Approaching the edge, I thought of the first time my mom and her longtime boyfriend Bruce had taken my sister and me to see the Grand Canyon. They’d helped us climb up onto a railing just like this one and held us tightly from behind as we stared out into the gap carved in the earth by the flow of water over millions of years. I remember as a nine-year-old kid feeling overwhelmed by the sheer scope of it all, as if realizing for the first time just how vast the world truly is and how very tiny I was within it. Standing here now, pressed along the railing with Jen and Holly at my side, I experienced a similar feeling of humility and a sense of connectedness with the earth.

Adam pointed to a rock formation I’d noticed to our left, three limestone towers that rose dramatically from the ground and narrowed to a point like spires on a church.

“That’s known as the Three Sisters,” he said, leaning out over the rail. “According to an Aboriginal dreamtime legend, they were once real maidens from the Katoomba tribe who’d fallen in love with three brothers from the neighboring Nepean tribe.”

Tribal law wouldn’t allow any of them to get married, he explained, but the brothers wouldn’t take no for an answer. They decided to capture their brides, which sparked a major battle between the two sides. Because the lives of the women were in danger, a witch doctor took it upon himself to turn the three sisters into stone to protect them from harm. Unfortunately, the doctor was killed in battle before he could reverse the spell and return the women to their former beauty.

“And so here they are to this day. Even though they’re stone, they’re still pretty beautiful, I’d say.” Adam smiled, almost to himself. “I always liked that story as a kid—I figured if I used magic, or at least wished hard enough, I’d be able to turn them real again.”

We laughed and teased him a little about that, and he shrugged, eager to change the subject. “Why don’t we take a little hike and see them up close?”

The four of us walked as a group to the archway fronting the Giant Stairway, a series of eight hundred steps and runways that led to the valley floor, right past the Three Sisters. Adam motioned for us to go ahead. As we got closer, I could see that the individual formations were so tall—nearly a thousand feet each—that there was no way they should be able to stand on their own. But somehow, they must have supported one another, keeping the group upright while the rest of the rock around them had eroded away.

Jen and Holly, who’d already bounded down the narrow set of stone steps etched into the rock, paused, waiting for me to join them. I walked the last few steps to where they were standing. Once again in our own formation, we walked the rest of the way together.