A journey of a lifetime

My family got to travel from Michigan to Washington and back again, visiting Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin on the way.

We got to spend time with family and meet up with friends. We saw amazing sights, hiked in beautiful natural scenery, visited several national parks, experienced terrifying weather, enjoyed great food, saw wildlife up close and personal, saw mummified fossils and paleontologists at work. We drank too many slusshies and pop, paid fortunes for fuel, put many miles on the vehicle, and killed way too many insects on our windshield.

I brought back some of my personal things from my parents home. It was a journey of a lifetime in more ways than one.

And I’d absolutely do it again.

On getting COVID

As near as we can make it, one of our daughters was exposed to COVID at school between Tuesday and Wednesday last week. On Thursday she had a fever and was not feeling well at all. We took her to get tested and came back with a positive COVID result.

With this result, our family began its own personal experience with COVID first-hand. The kids were pulled from school and we kept the sick one isolated as best as possible. But it’s impossible to keep everything isolated in a home and soon others were starting to feel ill too.

Including myself, who had been vaccinated. I took Friday off from work to recover but still felt pretty crummy on Saturday. My general symptoms were an annoying headache, elevated temperatures, and general fatigue. I would hate to think what this could have been like not being vaccinated. Lots of liquids, sleeping, and just general resting have helped immensely.

I am feeling much better now, if not fully recovered. The kids need to stay quarantined at home for 10 days after the last onset of symptoms before they can return to school. We are in a very privileged position where we can pull our kids from school and they can rest in a safe home, where I can take sick days from work and recover, where we can call in our grocery store orders and pick them up, where we can be vaccinated and thus, while still getting ill from COVID, not end up with worse symptoms that require hospitalization or worse.

COVID is horrible. Despite our families best efforts, we still caught it. It’s not the flu, and it’s not the common cold. Do your part and help the world move past this pandemic by getting vaccinated and wearing your masks when indoors or when you can not physically distance. Let’s stop people dying from easily treatable issues for lack of an ICU taken up by a COVID patient.

Slowly making progress

Despite how hard this pandemic has been and continues to be, I am hopeful. We are slowly making progress. We can all do our part to get past this.

  1. Get vaccinated (if you can)
  2. Use a mask when in public
  3. Keep your physical distance
  4. Stay in contact with friends and family – let’s not make physical distancing turn into social isolation.

I look forward to the day when I don’t have to wear masks all the time, when I can have friends over for games, when I can go to church in-person, when I can travel. It’s coming. It’s coming soon. Let’s step up and do our part to help that day come sooner.