It used to happen in the old world of office work. It happened to others too. Stop working, go on holiday, get ill. Wait weeks and months for that break…and see a portion of it disappear.
I didn’t have it so bad. Sometimes it would be a bad cold that would descend for the trip, but not get in the way too much. Others would be flat out with flu, or something else that threatened to reduce their holiday time to Lying Down And Possibly Sleeping.
Somehow or other, I now seem to have joined the ranks of going away and getting ill.
Or, more often, going away, sleeping badly (generally very badly) one night, and needing to duck out of plans for the next day.
It happened again this time. Two bad nights in a row. After the second, I was pretty much reduced to being able to stand up, and not speak, because I was so tired I thought I might burst into tears.
Yes, I know parenting is about sleep deprivation, and we have done that, though not by a long stretch as much as some. This trip did however include a) a bad nightmare, resulting in screaming at 2 am and b) a fall out of bed onto a wooden floor. Also at silly o’clock.
Neither of these tricks were performed by me, I tended to one and a half of them, and yes, I ended up finding it hard to get back to sleep afterwards.
I did perform the stomach ache that won’t go away routine all by myself. That was the second night. I think I got back to sleep before the fall out of bed moment. Afterwards…not so much.
I missed out on the Louvre.
It wasn’t so bad, I told myself. I had been to the Louvre before. I could try and go again. Dan was all prepped with exciting audio downloads, I’d already made a packed lunch. I could just let them go, and try and find myself some sleep.
I slept. Mercifully. For most of the day. It rained too – so that probably helped on the sleeping front. Order was restored, in time for the really big day out the following day.
(I didn’t miss that one. Nor the weather, when it suddenly went golden and autumnal.
So that was all right after all.)
Illness is an item we don’t want to find. Whatever our opinion of it, it surely finds us fast when it wants to. And when it blows in on a holiday, we humph and sigh, and feel we’re missing out.
But another part of us may think we’re getting the rest we needed in the first place. Because that is genuinely what we need on holiday. Cultural input notwithstanding.