News From Oklahoma

We’re a week into our vacation, spending a week at my in-laws house in Oklahoma. As you may have seen at our travel blog, we’ve visited some unique and wonderful places on the way out and have enjoyed camping and hiking. We also enjoyed meeting up with some friends in Arkansas that we met through this blog!

It’s always interesting to me to see that I typically feel pretty good while we’re on vacation and rarely experience a crash, even with the physical exertion of walking and some short hikes. That tells me that the stresses and exertion of normal day-to-day life wear me out more than light exercise. The kind of traveling we do is good for me, too. We take these long car trips in part because it’s too expensive to fly out here to see my in-laws, but we also really enjoy our road trips, and it works out well for me and my older son (my younger son’s CFS is well-controlled with medication). We might hike one day, but then we spend the next day in the car – forced to stay off our feet. We nap, we listen to audio books or favorite music, and we look for unique places to stop for lunch. It’s a slow rhythm - certainly slower than our normal pace of life - that’s good for us.

In fact, yesterday was the first day I’d felt a little worn out. At first, I thought that was strange. After all that walking and hiking I’d done in the past week, here I am at my in-laws house – they’re in their 80’s – and I never even left the house yesterday! But then, I realized, I’m back into housekeeping mode here – planning meals, cooking, dishes, lots of laundry, etc.

I’m also struggling a bit with my Lyme treatment right now. I made the stupid mistake of just packing my probiotic with the rest of the medications (in a big backpack in the car). I think the heat killed off all the good little bugs, so my stomach has been in terrible shape, and I’ve had to skip a dose or two of antibiotics here and there to give my GI tract a chance to heal. Ken found me some non-dairy probiotic at the drugstore yesterday, so hopefully I’m back on track now. Once we leave here and start camping again, I will definitely keep it in the fridge.

Our visits here have been tough the last year or so, since my mother-in-law went into a nursing home. Her Parkinson’s has her mostly immobile now, confined to a wheelchair and unable to even talk much (Parkinson’s makes it hard to project the voice and be understood by others). She’s such a good, sweet woman. She heartily welcomed me into the family when we married and has always treated me like a daughter. It’s hard for all of us to see her so frail and unable to even communicate well. We try to bring her back to the house as much as possible while we’re here, but she can only stay a couple of hours at a time because she can’t get to the bathroom on her own. We hate that we’re usually 2000 miles away and can’t be here more often.

Well, time to leave the lovely wireless internet at Panera and head back to the house to make dinner. It’s been fun being back in the blog world for a few minutes!