It was always on my list, but somehow I just never got around to it. Partly it was an aversion to muggy weather and crowds, but mostly it was procrastination. "What's the hurry?" I said to myself more than once. "New Orleans isn't going anywhere."

Before we go further, let me make it clear that in light of the lives lost, the homes destroyed and the livelihoods ruined, the fact that I might have forever missed my chance to nibble a beignet at Cafe du Monde hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But it illustrates an important point: We defer our dreams at our peril.

It's so easy to put off that once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Galapagos until the kids are out of school, to delay that trek to Everest Base Camp until your Intel shares hit 30, to put your first-ever visit to Paris on hold until the dollar bounces back against the euro. The Greek Isles can certainly wait until you retire; Machu Picchu has been around for five centuries _ what's a few more years? The lions and elephants will still be roaming the Serengeti five years from now. Won't they?

As Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have shown, the answer is: not necessarily. The French Quarter and some of the other tourist sites may have been spared the worst of the damage, but with the surrounding city so utterly devastated, it's hard to believe they'll ever again be as they were.

For years, my dad and I talked of having dinner at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. We joked about being able to look out the window between courses and see our old house in New Jersey. But somehow we never got around to it. Even after my dad passed away, I kept it on my list of things to do. And then, of course, came the tragedy four years ago.

My grandfather and I used to sit at his kitchen table and look at brochures of all the places he and my grandmother planned to travel after he retired: Hawaiian beaches, Alaskan glaciers, Florida sunshine. But not long after he got his gold watch, my grandmother's health failed, and all those brochures went into the garbage can.

As I've written previously, my wife, Jeri, and I were all set to visit Dubrovnik in 1990, but discovered at the last minute that our frightfully expensive Eurail passes didn't cover the ferry ride. So we put it off. Not long after that, Serbian mortar shells began raining down on the 15th-century walled city, and for a while it looked as if we'd wasted our only chance to see it intact. (We finally made it there last year, and I can report that the restoration was a huge success.)

Later in that around-the-world trip was to have been an all-time highlight for me: a few weeks in Srinigar, in the storied Vale of Kashmir. We'd already reserved our houseboat on Dal Lake and booked a pony trek up into the Himalayas. But a couple of months before we were due to arrive, I was thumbing through the International Herald Tribune on a train in Italy when an article caught my eye: A small bomb had exploded in Srinigar's marketplace, signaling a resumption of the separatist violence that had flared up the previous year.

Things didn't look overly dicey at the time, but we decided to bypass Srinigar on that trip and wait a year or two until things blew over. Fifteen years later, there are finally a few encouraging signs that the violence might be ebbing _ but it's still far from certain that I'll ever see the Vale of Kashmir.

When the final tally is in, though, I expect I'll have fewer regrets than most people. Because Jeri's health has never been good, and she knew she couldn't take the future for granted, we've rarely let a travel opportunity go by.

Her legs are starting to fail now, and not long ago we talked about where she'd like to go while she still can. It turned out to be mostly a list of places she'd like to go back to. She's already been to the Galapagos and the Serengeti, already hiked across the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, already paddled a kayak up an Alaskan fjord, already had her fill of Burgundian escargot. She has yet to swim with the manatees in Florida, but she'll do it soon. Oh, and last year, when she got tired of waiting for me, she went with a friend to New Orleans.

As you write your checks to disaster relief organizations, remember what the tragedy has taught us about the tenuousness of life as we know it. Go apply for that passport, book those airline tickets and move your long-deferred travel dreams onto the front burner.

"Twenty years from now," Mark Twain once wrote, "you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do."