Wanderung 6

Pursuing Pioneer Pathways from the Potomac to the Pacific

June-August 2004

July 29 - Turtle River State Park, North Dakota

I was hoping for calmer intestines but apparently I had caught a 12 or 24-hour virus of some kind, so the sudden trips to the bathroom continued unabated during the day although the intervals seemed to be increasing in length, which was a good sign at least. I found myself falling asleep on the sofa after breakfast and just gave up and went back to bed while Monika worked on converting Wanderung 4 to HTML for the web site, an exacting, tedious and time consuming task. I rejoined the land of the living around 2 p.m. and we had lunch together at least, after which Monika drove over to the office in the truck to pay for another night as I had finally become convinced that I really didn't feel like traveling that day. We worked some more on the computers after lunch and I read some more chapters of "Roughing It" to while away the hours.

Being ill while traveling is always more stressful than being ill at home, I have found, but having our own "home away from home" (i.e. the Tin Blimp) with us was a great comfort. Particularly for an illness where you have to intermittently access the restrooms, having your own bathroom inside is much preferable to having to unzip a tent, recall where the comfort station is, and walk quickly in that direction, particularly if it is night time and raining! During my lucid intervals I had pretty much the same set of diversions that I would have had at home. I could have even hooked up our computer cum TV, but watching daytime TV in the past has just made me feel more ill so I didn't even try to do that. Instead I was content with light computer work and our books, both electronic and paper.

Monika had thought to use Baby's external CD writer for backing up files on Daddy, whose CD drive had failed, and since that worked perfectly so we could back up all the pictures from the trip. That required 8 CDs where we fit an average of 600 to 700 pictures on each CD, so we had taken something like 5,000 pictures on the trip so far. Given that number of pictures, perhaps you can appreciate why it took Monika so long to try to find the perfect pictures to illustrate each day of our photo-journal. After dinner we set up the printer and Monika printed a collage of pictures from Glacier National Park for our last photo-letter to our kith and kin. She had picked pictures we took on the High Line trail, Lake McDonald, St. Mary's Lake, and Avalanche Lake as well as St. Mary's Falls and pictures of Bear Grass and Indian Paintbrush in bloom. Writing all the letters took us until well after 8 when we finally turned everything off and retired to bed to read a bit. Again we became so engrossed in "the Da Vinci Code" that we kept reading past our normal bedtime of 10 because we just couldn't stop. Books like that are dangerous threats to a good night's sleep!

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog Map Epilog
June 2004
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July 2004
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August 2004
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