View from the chalet in Switzerland, before the battery died and disaster struck.
Climb every mountain!
Ford every stream!
Follow every rainbow!
(Insert sound of record scratching...)
I was planning to do all those things on my vacation to Switzerland and Salzburg, Austria, including the famous Sound of Music tour. But things didn't go quite according to schedule...
Saturday morning I ran to the train station, in a hurry to catch my Eurostar train to Paris, where I was meeting my family (they'd been there three days, with the car). When I finally got to my seat, I laughed, remembering the nightmare I'd had, where I'd been trying to run through an airport to catch my plane (after hanging out with Alec Baldwin in the lounge) and my feet wouldn't seem to move. At least that portion of the dream hadn't come true!
I met the family in Paris, we loaded the car, and headed out of town. That's when the first disaster struck: the air conditioning broke, and we were stuck in hot, sticky Paris traffic. The drive to Switzerland was longer than Google maps estimated—and wouldn't you know central Europe was having a heat wave?
We didn't pull into our destination until after 11 p.m. It's no wonder the local police stopped us as we drove down the road through the Lauterbrunnen valley—no one but drunks are awake in rural Switzerland at that hour, even on a Saturday. It's the cows. They have to be driven up and down the roads early every morning, and again in the evening, as we found out every morning when we heard the clanging of cow bells.
Uncharacteristically, I slept late the next morning, not coming fully awake until I saw the amazing views. The chalet we'd rented was located at the very end of the road that snaked through the Lauterbrunnen valley south from Interlaken. You literally couldn't drive any further, unless you were driving cows. That meant we were surrounded by mountain peaks, with waterfalls (Lauterbrunnen valley has 72 of them) cascading down from mountain crevices.
I rushed to get my camera, and discovered my battery was almost dead. And I'd forgotten my charger. I went into a funk, sure my vacation was ruined—if you can't photograph it, you weren't really there, right? But at that point I didn't yet know the meaning of ruined.
I was planning a trip into Bern to look for a camera charger, probably a fruitless task, when I started experiencing stomach pains. I soon realized I wasn't going anywhere further than the toilet the next day. Traveler's diarrhea, they call it. A stomach bug. These things usually last 24 hours with me, but this bug was persistent, offering fever and chills and body aches as bonuses. Forty-eight hours later, it showed no signs of abating.
Despite this, we drove to Austria on Tuesday, to continue our vacation as scheduled. We even stopped in Liechtenstein, but all I could do was wait in the car while the rest of the family trooped up to view the castle of the last remaining heir to the Holy Roman Empire. Despite my interest in European history, I was content to gaze at a postcard.
I was determined the rest of the family would have a good time. This may be, I told myself, our last family vacation. And it was to be a dream vacation, culminating in the Sound of Music tour in Salzburg. But I was unable to do anything except walk from bedroom to bathroom to sofa and back again. On Wednesday I sent the family into the city to take the tour, happy to see them go—it meant I didn't have to share the sofa. I slept fitfully, gazing at the mountain I could see from the window, wondering if that was the one Maria twirled about on. I convinced myself it was, just to say I'd seen it. (It's actually located 10k from the Salzburg Abbey, which makes her a true miracle worker to make it back in time for dinner!)
Meals—which I'd envisioned as lovingly prepared in our kitchen, with locally-sourced produce and the French wines we'd picked up at Auchan— consisted of a few crackers for me, while my daughter cooked pasta for the rest of the family. I weighed myself on the scale in our apartment, shocked to find I'd lost 10 pounds in five days. I was sipping water constantly, but it wasn't reaching my tissues. I was shrinking.
At night I tossed and turned on uncomfortable beds, feverish, with a single lumpy pillow and duvet, longing for a good old American sheet and comfortable mattress. I would never, I swore, travel to Europe again without bringing my own sheet to cool off during heat waves and fevers. (Europeans don't use top sheets, only a duvet and fitted sheet.)
By Thursday, I'd had enough. I needed medical attention, and I needed my own bed. I broke the news to my family that we were cutting our "vacation" short. When I realized there were US military bases right on our way home (we can be treated there, due to my husband's retiree status) I decided a visit to Landstuhl Medical Center would be much more exciting than the stop we'd previously planned in Cologne. (Though Landstuhl is where wounded troops from Afghanistan and Iraq are sent, it also treats the huge American military community based at Ramstein.)
I don't remember much about the drive, only the efficient German toilets. And somehow the sat nav diverted us through downtown Munich. But by that point I was too weak to toss it out the window.
When we arrived at the Landstuhl ER, the wonderful staff treated me quickly, despite a busy backlog of patients. They hooked me to an IV and pumped four liters of fluids, potassium, and antibiotics through my veins. When I left in the wee hours of Friday morning, I felt downright plump.
I'm home now, resting, adoring my bed, and I've finally killed the travel bug—both kinds. I never want to leave home again. Not even for the best views in the world.
