Vacation Time Part I, or This Trip is Cursed

I decided to go to our family reunion this year. My parents are getting older and my mom doesn't like driving on the interstate, and my dad, although he's a professional driver with many years of experience behind him, probably shouldn't be driving the day-long distance by himself, either. This worked out very well, then, because instead of driving there by myself, which is difficult both to stay awake and just because driving that long, no matter how much you like it, is boring, I could go with them, stay where they were staying (didn't have to request a place to stay with a relative), and help them drive.

This was the plan. Before we left, however, all kinds of things started happening.

Like: the friends I had lined up to be my cat sitters. I'd asked them back in November of last year when I knew I was going to the reunion this June. Well, they had not one but two deaths in their family, one of those extremely unexpected. So the day before I left I had to find someone else to be my cat sitter.

I asked my neighbor, who I knew liked cats and used to have them, but didn't anymore because one of her grown children married someone who was violently allergic to cats. She texted me every night with updates on how they were doing and who she saw. Amazingly, she saw Apricot the first night she went over there. He didn't even hide, just watched her from the door of the tv room which contains his hiding place. Colby didn't hide either. But after that night all she saw was Thimble and the occasional Colby. Still, it's amazing! My little orange boy's getting some bravery in him.

Okay, so that disaster was averted. Then my dad ends up with this weird sensation two days before where sitting for more than two hours at a time left him in extreme muscle pain. Um, problem driving all day in a car then. The issue did resolve itself and appeared to be just simple dehydration (someone wasn't drinking enough!)

The day before we left I went into work just long enough to write up the previous day's work and leave. And I discovered that a massive amount of work from our outside manufacturers had just showed up (they should have been mailing it to us as they collected it, not waiting till they had a whole group)! Well, this made me feel really guilty about going on vacation and leaving such a massive pile of work to my backup person--whose normal job doesn't involve getting such a large amount done and while I'm used to fitting it in "somehow", he's not.

That was the same day I had to find another cat sitter, too!

Then I'd arranged a trail ride on horseback, my first one in about fifteen years, on Friday while I was up there with family, and the weather, of all things, was forecast to be rainy (and you can't go riding in the rain--it does funny things to the saddle leather, makes you and the horse miserable, and is generally a bad idea).

This trip was cursed ...

The curse continued into the drive itself, sort of.

The driving was fine, except for the fact that my going to bed late caught up with me and I ended up having to switch off with my dad way earlier than I'd planned. But the traffic was okay, and the weather cooperated--nice sunshine with adequate cloud cover.

Mom was our audio book and read to us, except when I had to try to take a nap.

The problem was supper. We stopped at one drive through for them, because they wanted chicken salad, but because I'm allergic to chicken and all that restaurant has is chicken, we had to stop at another drive through for me. I changed my mind at the last minute and got the beef and cheddar. What I did not realize, never having eaten this meal before, was that the cheddar was not a slice of cheese placed on top of the beef. It was instead the liquid form that was drizzled onto the beef.

I'm sure this is just fine for anybody who's not lactose intolerant. Other than being extremely messy to try to eat while driving, anyway. But for me. The only way to get cheddar to be liquid form (well, aside from keeping it heated constantly, and then the cheddar oil separates from the cheese and doesn't really work well) is to mix it with milk while it's hot.

I didn't even think about this. I just ate my sandwich and figured the whole feeling bad business was due to the long drive, the enforced socialization (which is stressful no matter how much I like the people I'm with), and the whole drama leading up to the trip.

It wasn't until the next morning when I was still feeling bad-funny, and then there was the lactose-intolerant bathroom consequences that those of you who are lactose intolerant know all too well, that I figured out what must have happened.

I spent the morning in bed, after stubbornly going for my morning walk.

Which was freezing, because apparently going that far north actually made it colder. I'm not used to this--it's logical, but it's not what happens. Normally it's the same temperature lows and highs that it is here, which is not logical, and thus annoying. I'd packed for the normal experience, though, and thus had no jackets (because I'd forgotten the one jacket I'd planned to take in the car with me, and hadn't packed a walking jacket) and I was going to freeze. Luckily my cousin A- had jackets to spare and she was willing to spare me one. It was even white and a windbreaker, which was very nice both due to visibility issues and the cold wind that morning.

My shadow against the horse farm I walked past during one of my morning walks

It's difficult to walk around their place. They live back in the country--lots of small farms around them with huge fields of barley (almost ready to harvest) and corn (just planted a month ago). But oddly, this means people go faster on the back country roads, which have no shoulders much less sidewalks. Often there's no way of getting off the road either, because it cuts through a mild hill instead of going up and over, so there's either three feet of vertical dirt and weeds rising on either side of the road, or somebody's crops (which I know enough not to trample!).

So being visible as you walk is critical, because the cars have to avoid you, since there is very little way for you to avoid the cars. But the trip "curse" had apparently ended with the bad food the night before (my mother said later she was unimpressed with the food they'd had too, which was her polite way of saying it was icky) and I didn't get run over, and I didn't encounter any transport trucks (18 wheelers) either.

Continued in Part II