Sick. I got sick damnit. Not cool. I woke up on our last day in Paris feeling hung over. Not much different than any of the other days so far but feeling very dejected about the prospect of hauling all our luggage up and down subway stairs (wheelchair access? Not in France). I caved in and told Dana that I didn’t have it within me to do all that foolishness and to just go for the easy solution and take a cab to the place where we were to pick up our rental car... still not realizing that the funk I had was a quickly oncoming flu or cold. Well, the cab ride was 30 Euros. Ouch. But there was more sticker shock to come when the agency gave us our brand new car on empty. Filling up a gas tank in Europe is not for the faint of heart. That was another 55 Euros. That and the all too frequent tolls on our way out of the city was enough to push me over into feeling downright sick. Dana worried and was ready to call it a day just north of Paris for my sake. I chose to push on towards Belgium by way of Rheims, famed for its cathedral. We stopped for lunch but skipped visiting the cathedral because I was feeling like shit. I think it may have been closed on Mondays anyway.
We drove into Belgium and came into an unpaved logging road which kinda freaked us out a little. Getting stuck on a muddy rut on this remote road would have ranked as a most craptastic experience. Luckily our trusty GPS knew the way out.
I had meant to drive all the way into Trier, Germany, our next stop and only 100 miles away since it was still rather early in the afternoon but I was getting the chills and feeling very crappy overall so stopped for the day at a bizarre motel/cafeteria combination on the Belgium/Luxembourg border.
The motel, as the Paris hotel, consisted of two tiny single beds with wimpy old pillows, lights that barely registered above a glow and bare cement floors. Kinda third world class really if you ask me. But I didn’t care half as much as Dana. I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep sleep sleep.
From this point on just getting up to go to the bathroom would send me into violent chills despite the room not being cold. I can’t even begin to describe how utterly crappy I felt both physically and mentally. Really, ALL I wanted to do was stay in bed and do nothing else whatsoever. I apologized to Dana who contented herself by killing time watching movies on my laptop while I snored louder than a runaway train.