Good day, and welcome to part two of my Christmas 2016 trip to Hawaii. (For part one, click here). My lodging on Maui was in the town of Kihei. After my first night on Maui, I got up early and made my way to the … Continue reading Hawaii, part two (December 2016)
It’s that time of the week again! Throwback Thursday – when I finally get around to sharing photos from not-terribly-recent trips. This week, it’s Hawaii, which I visited over Christmas and New Year’s in 2016/2017. This was almost two years after I was diagnosed with … Continue reading Hawaii, part one (December 2016)
It’s that time of the week again! Throwback Thursday – when I finally get around to sharing photos from not-terribly-recent trips. This week, it’s my trip to the Cayman Islands, which took place in November of 2015. This was my first trip outside the USA … Continue reading Cayman Islands (November 2015)
So, we have another COVID variant out there. This one seems to be named after a Transformer (I think it’s called Megatron or something). As if I weren’t already reluctant to start planning next year’s travel. Then again, my idea for next year’s travel starts with Flerida, and I seem to recall Flerida being one of the first states to re-open after the initial COVID panic.
When that initial COVID panic hit about a year and a a half ago, I had already booked a trip to Texas for April of that year. I had pre-paid some of the hotels, through Hotwire.com. The way Hotwire worked (at the time, anyway) was that you pre-paid in order to get the lowest prices, and there was no refund if you wanted to cancel. Obviously, when the governments shut down travel, Hotwire had to refund a LOT of pre-paid hotel stays. Combine the sheer volume of people contacting them for refunds with the fact that they weren’t accustomed to giving refunds to begin with, and Hotwire turned into a gigantic rat fuck. To their credit, I got my refunds, but it took several weeks. Since then, I do NOT pre-pay hotels (unless the traditional reservation would be super expensive, or there’s just nothing available). Even once COVID becomes a thing of the past, there’s just too much of a chance that something related to Parkinson’s will pop up and force me to cancel a trip. To me, the small savings is just not worth the gamble.
On the morning of July 2, 2015, I was still in the midst of my Roller Coaster Bucket List trip (which started with Spokane and Hell’s Canyon). I had spent the previous day at Kings Island, where I rode *the* roller coaster that had been … Continue reading Cincinnati Museum Center (July 2015)
It occurs to me that if this is going to be a Parkinson’s Travel Blog, then I probably ought to start planning some travel. So, here’s my first draft of an extremely tentative schedule for the upcoming year.
February: Central and western Florida (Disney, Busch Gardens, Salvador Dali and Ringling Brothers museums)
April: Texas (Sand Festival, Southwest Railroad Museum, two Six Flags parks)
June: Ohio (Cedar Point & Kings Island) or Canada (Banff and Jasper national parks)
August: Vermont (Cheesemaker’s Festival, multiple museums and hikes)
October: NYC (Open House New York, multiple museums, helicopter tour)
November: Central and eastern North Carolina (Kitty Hawk, historic towns around Albemarle Sound)
In the meantime, I will continue doing Throw-Back Thursdays, where I post about places I visited during my pre-blog years.
In June of 2015, I travelled to Clarkston, Washington to take a jetboat tour of Hells Canyon – the deepest canyon in North America. That’s right…deeper than the Grand Canyon (but not nearly as wide). I picked exactly the wrong dates to go, as the … Continue reading Hell’s Canyon (June 2015)
In June of 2015, I embarked on what I dubbed my Roller Coaster Bucket List Tour, which consisted of five amusement parks in five states. My first stop was Silverwood in Athol, Idaho. To get there, I took a flight to the nearby city of … Continue reading Spokane (June 2015)
This past Saturday was Moving Day NC Triangle – an annual Parkinson’s charity fundraising event in Raleigh. As usual, I added another east Carolina activity to make the trip that much more worthwhile. But unlike previous years, I now have Bear. When we’re at home, Bear is a serious barker. Any human or dog that walks by the house gets a good talking-to. But when I take him to dog parks, stores, friends’ homes, etc., he doesn’t have these barking fits. In other words, Bear seems to be barking to defend his “den”. This has led me to wonder…would Bear consider a hotel room to be his den? I certainly can’t take him to a hotel or an RV park if he’s going to launch into a tirade every time some one walks by. So for this trip, I went the Airbnb route, and found us a cottage in Carolina Beach.
On the night we arrived, Bear seemed quite agitated and confused. In fact, I may have gotten more sleep than he did overnight, as he was still fidgeting and whimpering as I fell asleep. I slept better than expected, but still woke up at 3 AM after five hours of sleep. I turned on the TV and started watching nature shows, and eventually got a little more sleep on the couch (and more importantly, came to realize that sometimes when I feel half asleep, I’m actually asleep). By 8:30 AM, Bear was looking out the front window, barking at passersby as if he owned the place. So, yeah. No hotels for Bear.
Thanks to the weather (overcast with occasional light rain), I really didn’t have to worry about staying cool. I took my extra Levodopa and I did a good job of staying hydrated and appropriately fed. But today, it wasn’t quite enough. I felt exhausted for most of the day. Around 3:00, I finally decided to go out to my car and take a nap. But when I got to the car, I felt like I really needed to just go back to the hotel and call it a day. I had spent about four hours in the park, and rode everything I really wanted to ride, so it wasn’t a bad day. Lightning Rod absolutely lived up to my expectations – it’s like riding a jack rabbit that’s high on angel dust. EXACTLY like that. Trust me, I know.
Voyages with Parkinson's 