Living Vicariously

 During our travels we've met many people who want to live vicariously through us. We speak a little bit about our adventures and the cool stuff we've seen and they can't get enough of the pictures and stories. Much like social media, when we recount neat things we are only talking about the highlights. But what about the lowlights? Can travel be bad too? So here it is, a window into our life for a 5-day span, unembellished and not just the highlights....

Context: we'd just gone on a wonderful cruise with Evan's family. Had a great time on the boat and a great time with his tribe. Our 5 day window begins the night after the cruise when we were in a hotel waiting to fly back from LA to Reno.

Day 1 (Los Angles, CA)

5am - Stomping from the room above. Constantly. Unceasingly. Someone loosed a 5-year old to just run back and forth and back and forth up there. For an hour straight without a break. After an hour, I called the front desk and asked for them to tell the room they were too loud.

6am - The running has ceased, we can finally get to sleep, right? Just drifted back to sleep when suddenly:

We hear a torrential downpour in the bathroom. The people above have started a shower, and due to bad maintenance their shower is emptying through our sink straight onto our bathroom floor!

We called the front desk right away but they couldn't send anyone for at least 10 minutes so we had to manage the gallons of water pouring into the room ourselves.

8am - Asked for a new room and moved all of our stuff. Hopefully we get to sleep 2 more hours before checking out. We asked for a refund for the night, given that we didn't get sleep and most of our toiletries were coated in mysterious shower water and would need to be replaced. 

Management: "Refund? Let's see... it seems like this was your fault so we won't give a refund."

Us: "How exactly did we cause the room above us to empty water into our bathroom?"

We called Expedia and sent them the video of our sink, they called the hotel and demanded a refund.... after first accidentally calling our upcoming hotel in Reno and cancelling our reservation for tonight. Do we even have a place to stay once we fly out of LA in a few hours? 🤷‍♀️

6pm - After sitting in a coffee shop all day it's time to get our flight. We both still feel like we're on the cruise ship and don't have our land legs back. Seems to be getting worse for me as time goes on, but maybe if I can just get to sleep at the next hotel things will be fine?

8pm - Time to board, I am not doing great. The world is spinning and I'm trying to not be motion sick. It's just a 1-hour flight, it should be over quickly.

It was not over quickly.

I watched as every minute ticked by for the 54-minute bumpy ride back into Reno. Desperately I fought back the nausea and the dizziness the whole time. 

The plane landed. I couldn't disembark fast enough and had to run to the plane's bathroom where I *ahem* lost the battle against the motion sickness. Shaky and clutching a ginger ale for dear life, I made it off the plane and to the airport exit. While I tried to ride the mental whirlpool going on in my head, Evan had to go ahead in an Uber to get the hotel and our car. The hotel we might not even have anymore.

Turns out, they had a room for us but it wasn't cleaned, so Evan had to change our room before he could get back to get me (still dizzy waiting at the airport).

10pm - Evan got me and dropped me off at the hotel before going to find dinner. 

11:30pm - Evan comes back with dinner, I tried to sleep but the world is spinning even with my eyes closed. Things have only gotten worse, so it was time to get help. A quick call to my doctor resulted in the recommendation to the go to the ER as I was probably having a bad reaction to my cruise sea sick medication.... 

Midnight - I'm admitted for my first ever ER visit. They test things and give me meds, and take me for a scan. On the way back as I'm being wheeled past the other occupied ER beds, I throw up all my medicines (probably my most expensive 🤮 ever, still waiting on the bill....). They give me lots of things but the dizzy world-spinning cyclone I'm in never stops. At least it's not making me nauseous thanks to whatever they gave me. They try to coerce me into signing a huge packet of paper, which I can't even read because I can't focus my eyes or brain. Luckily Evan is a boss and cuts through their tactics so I only sign the one paper that matters. The only thing tying me to this plane of existence is the cold wet washcloth I brought from the hotel. In the end it turned out I was indeed having a severe reaction to the sea sickness meds. Scopolamine is no joke, think I'll just take Dramamine and be drowsy in the future! (PSA: when changing the patch: wash the area thoroughly and then apply it to the opposite ear. This could save you from an accidental overdose. Or who knows, there's also wicked withdrawal symptoms that no one tells you about. Basically roll the dice and hope you don't get 3x the sea sickness later that the patch was saving you from...)

5:30am - I'm released and can go sleep in the hotel room. The meds make me want to pass out, but the dizzy doesn't give me a break. We both need the sleep given our horrible previous night, too. Poor Evan isn't done yet, though. He heads out into the world to pick up my prescriptions. I wake up every hour, but at least I'm not throwing up.

7:30am - Evan gets back and I take my new meds. We can finally sleep.

Day 2 (Reno, NV)

2pm - Officially wake up. Evan went to get Phò soup for breakfast/lunch in bed. I took more nausea meds and fought how drowsy they made me.

3pm - After a much needed lunch, I looked over and noticed a bug on the bed. We took a picture and flushed it down the toilet, but even with it dead we feared the worst. In almost 2 years of being nomads, we had yet to encounter bed bugs but it was one of our biggest fears. Given our lifestyle, if we weren't careful then we would be superspreaders. We would not be another Patient 31! We called the front desk and entered Threat Level: Maximum. 

We didn't see any more bugs, anywhere on the beds or in our luggage. Our only guess is that a previous guest must have brought a single hitchhiker. This was definitely something we couldn't risk bringing to other locations, though. Everything that could be sanitized was thoroughly sanitized. All the rest of our belongings were bagged and considered dead to us for possibly the next year. We dubbed the roof carrier "Quarantine Storage" and didn't bring the bags anywhere near the inside of the car. We enacted such strict protocols that even the exterminator we talked to thought we went overboard. 

Oh, and remember I'd gotten out of the ER like twelve hours previously. Seeing as there was nowhere safe to sit or lay since we didn't trust the beds, I laid down in the bathtub until the dizziness subsided enough to keep packing.

10pm - Laundry, packing, sanitizing, and moving done, we could end Day 2 in our fourth hotel room in 2 days.

Day 3 (Bieber, CA)

We have to start the 16.5 hour drive up North. Our Airbnb wasn't refundable, so we had delayed as long as we could. My anti-nausea meds made me extremely sleepy, so I couldn't share any of the driving. Evan had his gauntlet to start: 16.5 hrs, nearly 1k miles of road, and a dizzy barely-holding-it-together girlfriend in tow. Let's do this.

We made it 2.5 hours the first day before a snow storm stopped us in our tracks. We were lucky to find a small town in the middle of nowhere to stay the night; the only hotel for at least 50 miles. We got a quick dinner at the town's grocery/restaurant/everything building and bought new toothbrushes (we lost ours to Day One's shower/sink debacle) and headed back to our hotel (the only other building in "town"). Everyone there was super nice and could tell we were on a Quest.

Day 4 (Portland, OR)

Snow storm over, we were off again. Evan has about 7 hours of driving ahead of him. Luckily we drive a beast of an SUV and it handled the white snowy mountain roads we were on just fine. 

The windshield wiper blades, however, were not pulling their weight. We stopped for lunch and found a Walmart to get some replacement blades before diving farther up north. We got one blade switched after a lot of elbow grease and moved on to the second blade. We got the second one off the metal arm surprisingly easily. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was the lull of so many hours on the road, but we let go of the metal arm. Time seemed to slow down as it rocketed toward the glass and impacted. A fresh crack to match the one we got in Jersey a few months ago. Add a new windshield to our list of expenses and to-dos.

I remember only bits and pieces of the drive. I was still dizzy, and thanks to the meds, I was extremely sleepy. It all felt like a surreal dream, with neither being asleep nor being awake feeling good. We both commented often that we'd be happy when we got our land legs back and were finally "off the boat". It was some beautiful country based on what I do remember, though.

Day 5 (small town in British Columbia, Canada)

Dawn of the final day, we had 7 hours of driving left to make it to our Airbnb where we could stop and rest for a week. Truly it was our northern promised land.

From Portland we made it to Seattle:

And then the border!

Only a couple hours left! And then the snow started...

And snowed more.... The projected 2 inches, became 6 inches....

And our "couple" hour GPS-estimate doubled.... And that 6 inches of snow became 11 inches.... 

But we finally made it! We survived a Canadian blizzard and got the first night's sleep without an alarm clock in 5 days.

So to sum up, that was: sink overflowing, wrong hotel cancelled, turbulent flight, ER visit, bed bugs, losing/quarantining most of our stuff, snow storm, broken windshield, and a Canadian blizzard all within 120 hours.

During the midst of our harrowing journey a friend texted me about a first date she went on. She asked how I was doing. I said we'll talk about me later, I wanted to live vicariously for a little bit and hear about a normal day. 

(Update from the future: we did get our stuff back from quarantine. We treated it by heating it to 160*F for 8 hours, which is guaranteed to kill every form of bed bug, from egg to adult. After treating our stuff, we inspected it and didn't have a single dead bug anywhere. That's good news, it means even if we hadn't quarantined everything there was no possible way we could have spread any bugs to another location.)