Seven Amish Buggies and One Dead Pig Reprised

We already know that no two M.S. patients are the same.  Amongst all my other issues, I happen to suffer from serious vertigo and motion sickness due to the location of lesions on my brain.  Others don’t.  So, 16 hours over three days in a moving vehicle certainly isn’t my idea of a grand plan, unless the time spent moving happens because I’m traveling to see my step-son graduate from college. 

The hubby, perhaps the one person who really understands my motion problems (from 13 years of dealing with them front and center) planned a break in the trip to Vermont.  It was a break designed to give my noggin a rest and to allow us the closest thing to a mini-vacation we’ll see this summer.  Our 19 hours in Saratoga Springs, New York were wonderful.  The nineteenth century Victorian boutique hotel (hand selected by the hubby) was warm and inviting, filled with history and tradition.  The amazing Polo Panato Fontina E Prosciutto and superb wine selection at a nearby bistro wasn’t too shabby either. It was a brief, but much needed respite, from our crazy lives.

Could I have made the straight-eight from Pennsylvania to Vermont? Sure.  I did it on the way home.  But I’d prefer to avoid maxing out on the Dramamine and feeling the drug hangover for a day afterwards.  Breaking up the trip allowed me to feel great for the two days in Green Mountain country – as great as one can feel when in desperate need of a delayed Tysabri infusion because of the trip.

Readers may remember another recent trip the hubby and I took where he helped me work on my cognitive abilities with a little game in the car.  The game, now known for eternity as “Seven Amish Buggies and One Dead Pig” was reprised during the trip to Vermont.   You can only play the “find the letters of the alphabet on the road signs” game for so many hours, especially when there doesn’t appear to be a single sign in the entire state of New York with a word beginning in “Y” on it.  So we breathed fresh life into our other childish game, realizing that wherever we travel from here on out, this game will likely be our way of recording memories of our journeys. 

We saw neither an Amish buggy nor a dead pig on this trip.  So, from memory (as weak as it may be for me), here are the oddities that crossed our path this time around: 8 deer (nine if you count the one on the way home that I was just too tired to add to the list because I was definitely loaded up on that Dramamine for the ride back); 5 turkeys (not counting the one driving the car); 1 wolf dog (I think the hubby made that one up because I didn’t see it); 1 whistle pig (what my dad calls a groundhog or gopher); 2 horses’ asses (sticking out of a trailer blocking our view while playing the alphabet and the sign game); 1 barge; 4 cows on a very steep hill; 1 very sought after “Y”MCA (capturing the ever elusive “Y” in the alphabet game); a Bichon Frise named Harley; a couple of goats and their friend a black, pot-bellied  (and very much alive) pig; and the most amazing thing of all – a bagpiper, playing “Scotland the Brave” outside of our room at the base of Killington mountain (amazing because the song is the theme song of the Scottish university where I work; a song heard almost daily around campus, played by our own bagpipers).