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My June trip to other lands is over and behind me. And thanks to antibiotics, I’m in good condition.

The worst thing on trips is getting sick. When you feel bad, you want to be at home, in your own bed, with your own doctor nearby, your own TV and books to entertain you, and a spouse to bring you food and juice as you recuperate. When traveling, you’re in someone else’s bed, polluting their house with your germs, relying on them to give you all the things you need to feel better, and having a strange doctor to tell you what’s wrong. It really sucks the fun out of a vacation.

When the kids were young, they occasionally got sick with colds when we traveled. Our son got really sick over one Christmas vacation so that we had to take him to an urgent care center for treatment. His sickness spread to Hubby and I so that we cut our trip short and went home early. It’s hard to drive for hours and hours while blowing one’s nose all the time.

Now we get sick from being around our grandsons. Both Hubby and I came home with the flu after visiting them last year. When we visited them this past January, I came home sick with a bad cough. It took me forever to get over that bug. Last month, I visited them for three days. Just before we left, I wasn’t feeling 100 percent and tried to take precautions with extra vitamins. It didn’t help. By the end of the week, I was in urgent care being treated for tonsillitis. The doctor asked who I’d been kissing, and when I told him my grandsons, he nodded and said, “Ah, that would do it.”

My worst sick-during-vacation experience happened nearly two years ago and I wasn’t the one sick. Hubby got horribly ill in Germany while we were visiting the Neuschwanstein Castle. Hubby and I had to ride two trains and a bus to get back to our hotel. Once there, he collapsed into bed. I called the front desk and they said they’d send a doctor to come check on him. An old-fashioned house call, and I was so thankful for it. The doctor spoke rough English and we spoke no German. We managed to convey what was wrong, and the doctor started digging through his black bag. He filled a needle with something and proceeded to inject it into Hubby’s veins like an IV. Over the course of about an hour, he gave Hubby two injections of who-knows-what which put Hubby to sleep. Before he left, he gave me two small bottles of pills and told me when and how to give them. He gave me a bill for two hundred euros which thankfully, I had in cash.

I spent all that night checking on Hubby, feeling him, making sure he was still breathing, and praying. It was a very long, stressful night. The next morning, Hubby awoke feeling better but weak. It was a travel day so we had to leave the hotel and move on. Our tour guide was really good to us, giving me instructions on how to get to the next hotel in Strasburg, then putting Hubby and I in a cab and sending us off to the train station. Hubby and I rode the train by ourselves and managed to get off at the right station. We got a taxi and went to the hotel where they were expecting us. It took Hubby several days to completely recover, but he was soon back to his normal self. That’s one vacation memory that’s not a happy one.

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