Traveling Together. How?

Beltane                         Waning Dyan Moon

Speaking too soon.  Right after I posted the last entry Kate got sick.  She lay on the couch in our deluxe room, sweating and feeling miserable.  This concerned me, both for her and for what it might mean for our travel together.

I felt we had established the train as a good means of transportation for the both of us, then this sudden onset.  Perhaps it was dietary, perhaps motion sickness (to which she is prone), whatever it was, it seems to rule out the train, too.

Traveling with Kate is so much more fun, more pleasurable in a lot of the big and small ways you might expect.  The shared burdens of travel:  watching luggage, listening to announcements, finding the right exit become easier.  The shared joys of travel:  people watching, running commentary, being together also multiply.  So, I wanted the train to work.

My reaction to her illness was complex.  Of course I felt concern for her and empathy, but, too, I experienced disappointment, upset, some anger.  Just when I thought we had the travel thing licked, here she was, sick again.  Not fair on my part, no.  But, it was what I felt.

Not a pleasant moment for either of us.  Our job now, today, is to work out new wrinkles, perhaps scopolamine patches or different dietary choices.

Here’s the overall problem.   A difficult and painful ride back from Turkey six years ago, in which Kate suffered agony from the long haul, tipped me over from a reluctant flier to an only if absolutely necessary flier.  The thousand small insults of air travel combined with Kate’s difficulties to make me say, enough.  That was when I resumed taking the train, a practice begun long ago and abandoned for a time in favor of air.

A trip to Denver last fall made it obvious that Kate can’t take long rides in vehicles, either, so that ruled out car, truck or RV as modes of travel.  Note that none of this is her fault, underlying health issues from degenerative disc disease to an intolerance for certain motion stimuli just cause problems.

It does however leave us with diminishing options for traveling together, something  we hope to do more when she retires.  We’ll just have to see where this goes.