Way Back Machine: Eastern British Columbia

What’s more fun than having a respiratory infection?  Having a respiratory infection when you’re six months pregnant!  Yay! I went to Urgent Care yesterday only to have the doctor take one look at me and say “I won’t prescribe anything to pregnant women.  You’ll have to come back and see your GP.”  Fortunately my GP could squeeze me in today and I left with a magical prescription for Robitussin with codeine.  I’m hoping it works since I’ve been up all night coughing since last Tuesday.  Don’t you love it when you’ve coughed for so long that your ribs hurt and every cough feels like someone is stabbing you in the side with a rusty fishing knife? I love that, too.

In honor of feeling sick, today’s Way Back Machine takes us back to June of 2004 and eastern British Columbia .  It holds a special place in my heart as I was sick as a dog the entire time we rode through.

Here’s Steph outside of Prince George, at Canada’s World O’ Drugs or some such, buying Canadian nasal spray.   This stuff was pure gold.  I wound up keeping it for years after the expiration date because it was so much better than anything I could find here in California.

I was famous on our Alaska trip for never noticing any wildlife.  I could be three feet from a bear and not see it.   The one time I did see a moose was when I pulled over to blow my nose for the fourteen millionth time and it (the moose, I mean) just happened to be hanging out in a lake visible from the road.

You can’t see the moose in this picture, but here’s Steph turning around to see why I’d stopped.  I promise there’s a moose in that water.  And I also promise my nose was running like mad thanks to the Canadian nasal spray.

The part of being sick on that stretch that really sticks in my mind was just outside Chetwynd, when we pulled over to a rest area so that I could stop hallucinating.  Tony, Steph, and I all wound up falling asleep on these picnic tables; probably my favorite riding nap of all time.

On June 16, 2004, I blogged:  “If this whole ‘software programming’ thing doesn’t work out, I’m going  to invent a nose bib for motorcyclists who get colds while touring, and
I’m going to make a million bazillion dollars.”  I think I still may have something there.

Later that night, I reported from our hotel room:

“Our colds are subsiding. We still make disgusting noises, especially in the mornings, but I don’t feel nearly so much like I died last week and just forgot to lie down. We all went to bed at 9:30pm last night, being the party animals that we are, and I think it did everyone a world of good. Now I’m just always dehydrated and have a scratchy throat. This town is pretty much LungInfectionsville, though, with all the mud and dust and diesel trucks going through. I’ve been holding my breath since we pulled in around 5:30pm. Fort Nelson’s city motto is ‘The Resourceful Fort Nelson!’, which you know is never a good thing for the environment or for the squishy pink bits inside of you.”

The cold subsided a bit and then came back to bite me in Whitehorse, YT, which was annoying because I’ve heard that Whitehorse is really a beautiful town.  My predominant memory of Whitehorse, through a cold medication haze, is eating at the hotel restaurant and overhearing a very dressed-up young woman carrying balloons being very matter-of-factly upset that she had planned some sort of reunion party and no one showed up.   My impression was that she wasn’t very popular but had been hoping someone would have attended her party.   I think she was wearing a bright blue dress.  It still makes me a little sad to think about.

Being sick while on the road sucks but arguably it’s all part of the adventure.   And, as they say, adventure is just misery recounted at leisure. 😉