EIGHT AND A HALF YEARS AGO, WHEN the oncological bookmakers gave my father three years to live, we sat together in his hospital room and vowed that, if he survived, the two of us would take a trip each year to celebrate his outliving his expiration date by another twelvemonth. When we cooked up this scheme, I think we both privately thought we were merely following timeworn etiquette that calls for grand travel fantasies when someone is dying. (Think Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck to Ratso Rizzo in extremis: "When we get to Miami … .") But when Dad surprised us both by beating his rogue cells into remission, it would have been a thumb in the eye of St. Christopher to go back on our vow.

Though we travel in celebration, the trips themselves rarely deliver much ecstasy. Our first, to New Zealand's Great Barrier Island, nearly killed me. This was 1999, and we picked Great Barrier because my father, a professor of economics and a man who likes value, had a friend with a jungle cabin we could hole up in for free. The "cabin" was a dank shack built of fence posts; its only furniture, a mattress unfit for a hyena, lay in shadow in a corner. To steel myself for what would be an uncomfortably intimate evening with Dad, I drank about two bottles of wine, vomited against a banana tree, and passed out beside him. When dawn broke, the evil scent in the place had intensified. Rising groggily to a sitting position, I noticed the mattress was covered in what looked like a hail of Milk Duds but which were in fact emissions from the dead and bloated jungle rat we had used for a pillow the previous night. I'm not overstating things when I tell you my heart started beating wrong that morning. When I got back to the States, a cardiologist diagnosed me with a sudden-onset heart murmur, brought about by dehydration and shock. If I keel over prematurely of an aortic aneurysm, you'll know why.

Our next odyssey, a cruise through the Galápagos Islands in 2001, nearly killed my father. He spent most of the trip suffering through a case of tropical-force Montezuma's revenge. The entire boat shook with his illness, a sound like a tuba quintet tuning up belowdecks. And I still feel guilty about what happened when he was finally well enough to go ashore. Remember the 2001 marine iguana die-offs in the Galápagos? The press blamed 200,000 gallons of petroleum spilled from a busted tanker, but I submit that one Ed Tower introduced a quantity of noxious material to the local ecology when, while skinny-dipping in a cave, he misplaced a pair of microbially "hot" Hanes briefs and some sandals you could have used for fish bait.

Other timeless moments include our 2003 trip to Istanbul, where, against my advice, Dad drank a platter of beef grease and practically went blind for 48 hours. And last year's trip through France's Loire Valley, where, out of thrift, we often shared a bed but Dad wouldn't hear of sleeping in—please, for the love of God—his underwear, at least.

Though Dad is officially cancer-free now, he beat back a second bout two years ago and is still settling into a new immune system, thanks to the bone-marrow transplant. So for our 2007 trip, in late May and early June, we plotted an itinerary through the comparatively sterile subarctic: five days in Iceland—my older brother, Dan, would join us for that leg—and five in southeast Greenland. We also chose our destinations with a certain irony in mind. Iceland, though recovering, remains a case study of ecological disaster, a nation whose people felled nearly all of its trees centuries ago and whose topsoil, thanks to overgrazing, blows ceaselessly into the sea. To the northwest lies Greenland, whose famously decaying ice sheets make it another marquee destination on the eco-disaster trail. Some estimates predict that once the global-warming teeter-totter tips, Greenland's ice, which covers an area more than three times the size of Texas, could melt entirely within the next millennium, if not sooner, which would boost sea levels some 23 feet and drown the world's present coastlines.

As agents of human bungling par excellence, we thought it fitting to take a tour of these monuments to humanity's special gift for fucking things up.