Down for the Count

Well I thought my days sleeping like a baby every two hours were over yesterday.  But nope.  I've been sleeping most of today. I woke up in the middle of the night with a splitting headache and nausea.  😩 I've been down this road before... many times. This is my "girl, you're doing too much sickness" where my body forces me to shut down.  So here’s to keeping it real with this picture lol

So in this post, instead of taking about sleeping, drinking water, and vomiting (which is actually what I did today), I will talk about what led up to this point that had me so busy and ultimately got me so exhausted.

1. Trip Prep is no joke, especially when you're traveling to countries the require advanced visas, vaccinations, and trips within trips.  
• It took a while to get the Bangladesh visa, not just because the user interface for the online form was difficult to navigate but also because my first submission came back with revisions required. I needed both a letter of invitation and (I should have known this one) a cashier's check instead of personal check for the visa fee. 
• The India visa was a little easier because it was an electronic tourist visa that could be obtained online.  10 years ago this didn't exist and I had to mail my passport to the consulate in Texas similar to what was required for Bangladesh.  But the questions on that application are super detailed requesting things like the birthplace of your parents, the history of countries visited in the past 10 years and even previous visas obtained.  
• Because I plan to volunteer for part of my trip and was considering Bali, I found myself going back and forth with the Indonesian consulate about the particular visa needed for volunteers.  Due to my confusion about that visa process I decided to go to Sri Lanka instead and opted to use Sherpa and pay their markup to obtain the e-visa on my behalf. At the time I gave in to using a service because the Sri Lanka visa application site was throwing 500 errors and I didn't have time to wait things out of a fix and also didn't want to trust that my personal identifying information (PII) would be submitted properly. 
• Lastly, Before leaving I needed to have all the visas printed (if not already in my passport), yellow card updated with vaccines, immunizations refreshed and flights purchased.  Plus a had another long list of "Things to do before Oct 29". Communicating with my volunteer hosts who are in 17 hours ahead was also a challenge.  I can see why people get personal assistants!

1. Traveling.  In the month of October I took lots of road trips.  Within one week I was in Asheville, NC, Floyd, VA in the Blue Ridge mountains, and the Maryland DC area.  Then I took a week off and drove to Orlando Florida. Had a great time in all places, but I'm sure I could have recuperated more between trips. 
2. Eating or rather, not eating well. So it goes; when traveling eating habits often fall off for me. I'm grabbing meals on the go or having coffee and pastries instead of meals. In the case of back-to-back flights, unseasoned, prepackaged plane food and airport snacks substitute for morning fruit and vegetable smoothies and the volume of water I typically like to consume.

Just writing this post and thinking about all this is making me tired all over again! 😅 But today I've hit the reset button. I had a bowl of fruit and tea after recovering from my nausea and had some Lo-fi beats playing in the background.  

I tried listening to NPR's On the Media, but actively listening to that was literally making my headache worse! By the end of the day I was able to try on my dress which I had altered for tomorrow's big event! Stay tuned!