Sick Day

Pedregal – Ipiales, Colombia

Well, this is going to be short.

I woke up this morning with diarrhea. 

No big deal. I’ve had that before. So we started biking toward the border, and, potentially, beyond. 

Basically 26 miles of ascent to start the day . . .

Only my body was going in the other direction. As we biked up my health was going down . . . More diarrhea, achy, maybe a fever. 

While the scenery was beautiful, the ride was pretty miserable . . .

Dr. Liu gave me some medicine – some type of intestine slower-downer and some pepto bismo to chew. And eventually some Tylenol as well. 

Once I had all that in me I had a brief burst of not-so-horrible – which was good because it coincided with an hour or so of straight up. Grin and bear it . . .

We were planning to stop by that apparition site – and we even started biking there. But then I started to feel even more miserable again – and it started to mist and looked like actual rain up where the sanctuary thing was. 

So we turned around and limped back to a hotel in Ipiales. Where we are now. Lying in bed with my cowboy blankie. 

(I’m going to venture into one small piece of commentary . . . Colombian hotels have this weird thing with windows. Pretty much every hotel we go to these days they give us a room with no windows – sometimes with no ventilation at all. Today the room that they first gave us had a big window . . . facing an indoor hallway. So the choice was to feel like we’re in the zoo with other guests maybe throwing us some peanuts, or shut the drapes entirely. 

Well, I’m sick, but we’re not moles. 

Diana went down and managed to get a different room – and now we have a nice bright enclave with a wall of window looking out. None of these places are busy – so hard to understand why they always seem to try to give you the prison cell first . . .)

One other thing . . . As we approached this border town we saw a bunch of people who were clearly migrants. Kind of relevant to today’s news. I guess they were coming from Ecuador – but we don’t know anything more . . .

Okay, that’s all you get. 

I’ll dump some photos in here so you can see how pretty it was again today.

Hopefully I feel better tomorrow and we’ll say goodbye to the wonderful country of Colombia. She’s up and down – tempestuous, I guess you would call her – but she’s beautiful and unforgiving and generous and kind. (Diana says she sounds like Sofia Vergara).

It’s been wonderful. I hope we meet again!

Ps – I must have confused things yesterday. We didn’t decide to bike 25 miles per day. We just decided to avoid huge – like 10,000 foot – climbing days. Yesterday that meant 25 miles or so because of where hills and hotels landed. We actually intended to go into Ecuador today, but toned that back because of my feeling sick. We like the biking. That’s why we do this. The lesson wasn’t that we should bike less generally – the lesson was that we should avoid doing too much elevation in one day . . .