"It's become a way of rejuvenating that supersedes any spa treatment that we could have gotten," Brown says. "It's the connection that's larger than ourselves."
The connection "larger than ourselves" is another recurrent theme. The fun, talking and laughter often mix with tears.
Lisa Baldwin's first husband, Taylor, who played basketball at UM, died of brain cancer several years ago. Her Alpha Phi friends all came for the funeral.
"After the funeral was over, we all went over to Bentley's in College Park and sat there and had lunch, and kind of had a mini-girlfriend getaway," she says. "And it was the best thing."
The story of Bonnie Ayers' getaways involves loss, too -- but also inspiration for women and their friends.
It was 1993, and Ayers, a public information officer for Montgomery County, had decided to visit a friend from her UM days who was living in Washington state. She mentioned the trip to Pattie Mallonee, another college friend in Virginia.
"And she gets this gleam in her eye," Ayers, 66, recalls, "because Pattie had the true pioneering spirit. She always liked to see what was beyond the next hill."
Mallonee had multiple sclerosis, though for a long time that didn't slow her down. On their first trip, the women decided on a whim to drive farther north than they had planned and ended up in Canada. They didn't know it, but they were pioneers in girlfriend getaways.
They traveled every year after that, always in the West. By 1999, Mallonee's illness had progressed, and she was in a wheelchair all the time. Still, the three women were up for every adventure they could find and decided to visit a glacier in Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada.
"This one bus that went out to the glacier had a lift in it," Ayers says. "The bus drove onto the glacier, and we got out and rolled her around on the glacier. And it was great; it was fantastic."
That was their last trip together. Mallonee died in the fall of 2006.
"After losing Pattie, we thought, you know we take things for granted," Ayers says. "You don't think about anything ever ending.
"We realized that if you're going to do these trips, you need to stop talking about them," she adds. "You just need to go and do them, because you just never know."
So the two remaining friends ventured out last fall, exploring new places but also revisiting some they had seen with their friend.
