Planes, Trains and Contagions

February 20, 2025

I woke up drenched in sweat. At first, I thought my water just broke, but then I remembered I wasn't pregnant and realized it must have been my fever that broke.  Usually, being sick on a vacation is a real bummer because you miss out on whatever site you were going to see that day, or days, or even a week. But when you are slow traveling like we are, the impact isn't as devastating. You do, however, get sick more often given all the close contact with people in airports, train stations, bus depots, and ferry docks.  Not to mention your own family. We began our first dominoe fall in Mostar, Bosnia, the second stop on our trip.

It started with my youngest. A little cough in the back seat of a taxi that seemed harmless enough at first. By the time we reached our destination—a charming little guesthouse tucked down a side street near the Old Town -she was curled up in a ball, radiating heat like a furnace. Within 24 hours, my middle child had joined the ranks of the infected, followed shortly by my oldest. Then my spouse. Then me. Like dominoes, we fell, one by one, succumbing to the same fever, the same relentless cough, the same general sense of doom.

Traveling while sick is a unique kind of misery. You aren’t tucked away in the comfort of your own bed, armed with your favorite tea and the one brand of tissues that doesn’t sandpaper your nose. Instead, you find yourself scouring pharmacies where you don’t speak the language, trying to decipher whether a box labeled in a foreign script contains cold medicine or industrial-strength laxatives. You weigh the risk of getting on that next train versus staying put and letting your carefully booked itinerary unravel. You ask yourself philosophical questions like: “Will I make it through this five-hour ferry ride without vomiting in public?”

The problem isn’t just the sickness—it’s the settings in which we fall ill. Airports, train stations, and boats are the perfect petri dishes for germs, filled with tired travelers rubbing their eyes, sneezing into their hands, touching railings, pushing elevator buttons, exchanging passports with equally exhausted customs agents. You can practically see the microbes doing the cha-cha on every surface. And once one of us gets sick, there’s no stopping it. We share tight quarters—hotel rooms, rental apartments, tiny train compartments. Someone sneezes, and the whole family is doomed.

In the end, we survive. We adjust our plans. We binge-watch bad TV in a hotel bed. We discover which foreign cough syrups taste the least terrible. And when we finally emerge, bleary-eyed but victorious, we step back into the world, a little weaker but a little wiser. We roll with it. Because that’s travel—sometimes it’s breathtaking landscapes and perfect meals, and sometimes it’s a week spent battling the flu in a rental apartment above a fish market.

And honestly? Both make for a pretty good story.