It has been a long strange road since I last wrote in this space, and yet we have not managed to go anywhere at all.  If anything, the events of the past month have reminded me of how much I love my Airstream, and how relatively trouble-free it has been.

You might be thinking, “Aren’t you the guy who had the brake actuator problem that canceled your trip a few months ago?” and yes, you’d be correct.  But that failure was one of only a rare few incidents that have derailed Airstream voyages, whereas our success rate with airplanes has been much worse.

It all started last October, when Eleanor and I decided we finally had accumulated enough airline points to book a family trip to Japan for the cherry blossom season in late March.  The mystery, beauty, culture, and food of  Japan have long beckoned to us, especially Eleanor, and we have been saving up points on our airline-affiliated credit cards for that dream trip over the last five years. We worked every angle to build up points until we could get (almost) free tickets to Tokyo, with a stopover in Oahu, to depart in mid-March.

From that point, we spent many hours over the winter preparing for this trip.  We bought maps and guidebooks, and downloaded information about Tokyo’s complex rail system.  We planned out our days, reserved hotels, figured budgets, and researched specific historic and natural sites we wanted to see.  I figured out how to stay in touch with the office (using Skype, and iPad, wifi hotspots, and remote access to my computer).  I even bought a translator app for my iPhone, and guides to the language and culture.

But the trip didn’t happen. Japan is an extraordinarily expensive place to travel, and with various unexpected expenses over the winter, by February it became clear that this wasn’t our year to go to Japan.  Reluctantly, we canceled the trip and got our points returned (for a somewhat painful fee of $300), and vowed to try again sometime in the future.

In a way, we were lucky.  Two days before we were scheduled to fly, Emma and I were stricken with some sort of horrible virus.  We thought it was a cold, but it turned out much worse (fever, chills, nausea, etc.) and in retrospect we think it was actually the flu.  Whatever it was, we were incapacitated for about a week. Only Eleanor was spared, and she was kept busy with nursing duties.  If we had kept our trip to Japan, we would have been sick on the flight to Oahu, and on the flight to Tokyo (a total of 14 hours on airplanes).  That wouldn’t have been feasible for us, and if we had tried it we would have probably infected the entire airplane.  Plus, our entire first week would have consisted of Emma and I lying in bed at the hotel and looking out the window at the cityscape of Tokyo, while refusing all offers of food.  It would have been a disastrous “dream” trip to Japan.

However, when we canceled Japan, we kept the trip to Oahu as a sort of consolation prize, shortening our trip from three weeks to six days.  So all the time we were sick, and all the time that Eleanor was taking care of us, we had the knowledge that at least we’d still get a vacation to the beautiful islands of Hawaii.

Now, there’s definitely nothing wrong with going to Hawaii for six days, but if we had originally planned to go solely to Hawaii we would have not chosen Oahu as our destination.  So after we recovered from the virus, and after a lot of discussion, we changed the destination to Maui.  This required cashing in some more airline points and another $272.  We re-booked the hotel, reserved the car, and started researching hikes in Haleakala National Park. All seemed well, until …

… two days before we were to leave, Emma woke up with a cold.  This triggered an ear infection, which meant a visit to the doctor and antibiotics.  She wasn’t capable of flying in that condition.  Reluctantly, we canceled the trip to Maui too.  Another scramble ensued to recover airline points ($180 in fees) and cancel all the associated reservations.  This trip to Hawaii and Japan has become the most expensive trip we’ve never taken.

Today would be the fourth day of our Hawaiian vacation, or the 17th day of our tour of Japan.  Instead, it is more memorable as the fourth day of a ten-day course of Amoxicillin.  It’s pointless to wail about the trip we aren’t having right now, and we know that someday we will manage to pull it off, but at this time I have to contemplate the Airstream and how very good it has been to us.  Many times we have been sick while traveling and rather than punishing us with fees or threatening us with exploding eardrums, the Airstream has always provided a cozy, safe, peaceful place to lie down and get well, without serious interruption of our travels.

The Safari has been busy this season doing duty as a guest house, and is doing so right now, so we can’t take it out this weekend.  But we will find somewhere to go in order to feel as though we got a little bit of vacation, as soon as Emma is feeling better.  No more booking airline flights for us.  This time we’ll take the car.

Time slowed to a near standstill for me last week, when I was suddenly struck down by one of those cruel stomach bugs.  You know the type.  I was in the car with Eleanor and complaining that her erratic driving was making me carsick, but it wasn’t her driving at all.  A few minutes later we were sitting in the car talking while Emma finished up her karate class, and then alarms went off in my lower intestines.  A minute later I was crumpled in the parking lot, trying not to puke on the pavement while the karate moms watched.

There’s something about the nature of an abdominal illness that quickly reduces your personal pride to a level you did not previously think you could reach.  I was overcome by an urgent desire to lie flat, even on the ground amongst the dirty asphalt and cigarette butts, if only that would alleviate my distress.  I broke out into cold sweat and shivered with chills. It had come out of nowhere, and there was absolutely nothing to do for it but get home as quickly as possible.

I spent the rest of the evening and the night shaking and groaning.  Whatever had struck me, my body wanted it out as quickly as possible.   This is a time when all of your pride, all of your possessions, all of your social status are stripped away.  At the moment when your guts are twisting there’s little to think about except surviving to kneel on the cool tile floor of the bathroom.  It doesn’t matter if an few hours earlier you were flying on your private jet, returning from a sun-filled weekend on the beach with a harem of bikini-clad masseuses.  In the cold dark night, as chills rack your body, you can finally appreciate what older folks meant when they said, “At least you’ve got your health.”  We are all equal in the world of the stomach virus.

It was late morning before I was able to contemplate anything other than clear liquids, and a full day beyond that before I felt well again.

When we were full-timing, this was one of the nightmare scenarios for me.  Being incapacitated myself would be an inconvenience, but Eleanor and I had a simple plan: we’d pull over at the first available opportunity and wait it out, no matter where we were.  This strategy occasionally resulted in being stopped in some odd places, but usually when someone was getting sick we had enough warning to find a decent campground.

No, my nightmare scenario was either “E” or “e” getting sick suddenly.  That scared me a lot more.  When Emma was a tyke we watched several times as she was knocked flat by those viruses that little kids get, and each time it was horrible to see.  This is a situation that all parents end up in; it’s just a little tougher when you’re away from familiar health care.  Emma’s pediatrician was always on speed-dial, and we learned to mentally note the location of the nearest hospital or urgent care center as we rolled into town, a habit that sticks with me even today.

The illnesses that we have dealt with to date in our travels have been fairly garden-variety (colds, migraines, cuts).  Fortunately we never needed the hospital, but we came close once in Florida when Eleanor sustained a massive migraine that lasted an unusually long time.  I found a full-hookup campground and covered the trailer with blankets to dim the interior to near-total darkness during the day.  We ended up at an urgent care center.  It ended well, eventually, but the experience was fair warning that anyone, at any time, can suddenly run out of time.

What’s to do about that?  Nothing, except go on with life.  If anything, this reminded us how lucky we were to be traveling, because so many other people we knew had missed their chance and were now stuck at home with medical conditions that prevented them from traveling.  Eleanor’s father wanted to buy an Airstream and visit all the national parks, but he died before retirement—and he’s just one of many examples. I wouldn’t say “live every day like it’s your last,” because you’d quickly run out of money and probably catch a venereal disease, but at least live every year like you might not get another one.

This is harder than it seems, especially when health concerns have already caught up you.  I’m always impressed by those who have such severe wanderlust that they manage to overcome difficult illnesses and see the country anyway.  We know people afflicted with Multiple Sclerosis, people on dialysis, people in wheelchairs, and some who can barely see, but with the assistance of their partners are getting out there to explore their dreams and make new friends. It makes my tiny bout with a “24 hour bug” seem hardly worth considering.

If there’s a silver lining in the virus that I just had, it’s that it briefly took away all my quality of life, to remind me of all the good things I might have taken for granted.  I’m glad it’s gone, and that I’m eating real food again, and able to walk fully upright.  If I may, I’d like to say to the viruses of the world, “Appreciate the thought.  No need to remind me again anytime soon.”

There was a time when I really hated Spam, the canned meat product made by Hormel.  I still am not a big fan of the stuff, but with time I have gained a perspective on it that makes it more palatable. It’s iconic of America, it’s still a staple of contemporary Hawaiian cooking, the yellow and blue can brings back childhood memories whenever I see it on the shelf, and really, it can be good if you make it right.

Oh, I know, some of you are saying, “Yuck—he can’t be serious.”  But I am.  For example, when Emma was born my brother visited us in the hospital and handed me a can of Spam and a spray can of Cheez-Whiz.  He said, “Get used to it—this is all you’ll be eating for a while.”  Eleanor decided to make him eat his words, literally, and kept those two cans on the shelf for a year.  One day she mixed them up with some polenta and made a well-disguised appetizer that she called, “Polenta and cheese with ‘domestic pancetta‘.”  My brother and my father ate ’em up (the little wedges she’d made were actually darned good on crackers), and only after the entire plate was gone did she tell them what they had actually eaten.

So Spam can be a tasty treat once in a while, and I don’t hate it.  I still don’t eat it much, but I do have more of an appreciation for the stuff, and for its role in our society.  Likewise, I’m gaining a small appreciation for the other type of (lower case “s”) spam, namely spam email.

In the early part of the First Decade, spam was pervasive, annoying, and even intimidating.  There was fear that the unchecked volume of spam email would eventually overwhelm us all, clogging the Internet and billions of email Inboxes like an invasive species.  New takes on confidence tricks like “phishing” for passwords and “advanced fee fraud” (AKA Nigerian 419 scam) were sucking in many people, who lost hundreds of millions of dollars.  Like any red-blooded Internet user, I hated spam just on principle. It had to be stamped out.

Eventually, the geeks came to our rescue.  Math geniuses hired by companies like Google and Microsoft worked up clever algorithms to quickly identify and divert spam to places where it can do no harm, in effect, toxic waste dumps for email.  Like everyone else’s, my Google email has a Spam box where about 99% of all the spam email I receive is automatically filed.  I never have to see it or sort through it.  Like the prospect of global nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, spam email has faded from being a source of constant anxiety to just another one of life’s realities.

Even though I don’t have to pay attention to it anymore, I do go look once in a while.  It’s a good practice, just in case a legitimate email accidentally gets mis-filed, which happens once in a long while.  But mostly I look at the Spam box because it’s a great source of entertainment.  When things are dull around the office, I look for interesting new variations on the advanced-fee scam, or funny announcements of various European lotteries that I have won.  (I win a lot of lotteries these days.)  I like the constant barrage of people who “just happened to be looking over your website and noticed you aren’t listed at the top of Google”.  (So many wonderful people are looking out for me.) I’m flattered by the beautiful women in the Ukraine who are looking for husbands just like me.  Just about the only thing I don’t appreciate are the many offers to “increase your manhood.”  Hey, I’ll take a winning lotto ticket but just what are you implying about my love life?

In fact, it has gotten to the point that I’m now disappointed when my Spam box contains a bunch of garden-variety re-runs.  Note to scammers: I’m looking for creativity.  When you send me a plaintive cry from the cancerous wife of a deposed Africa dictator, I want an engaging and heartbreaking story or I’m not going to bother reading all of it it.  Next time I win the “Pan-European” lottery, give me a good spiel to explain how the heck I got entered in the first place.  If you want me to visit your porn site, have “Rudmilla” write me a better come-on than “I’m hot for a man like you!”  And if you’re going to buy my car off Craigslist, at least have the decency to know the car’s year and model before you send me a bogus check for $2,000 more than the purchase price.

This is the next frontier for the scammer and spammers, as I see it.  Like any marketer, they’ve got to try harder to get my attention, and I don’t mean by being more obnoxious.  They’ve had a free ride all these years with dumb email blasts that favored quantity over quality.  Now technology has given us the upper hand, and that means it is time to demand better things from our spam.  Otherwise, I’m not eating it.