Traveling Pregnant

Currently, I am in Boston attending the public library association annual conference, and I am still alive, although a bit tired and sore. It is now day 3 in our trip.

So, back in October when I booked our flights for my library conference in Boston, I thought, hey, spending 8 hours flying to Raleigh, North Carolina, renting a car, driving 4 hours south to my sister-in-law’s house, dropping off Ben, staying the night, then flying out of Columbia, South Carolina at noon the next day and spending 8 hours traveling to Boston — well, it will be challenging, but doable.

Of course, I was only 2 months pregnant at the time.

Day 1: This is the reality, that at only 8 weeks from my due date, I haul a 4-year-old and a lot of baggage through multiple airports on a Sunday. We get up at 4:30 a.m. (I only sleep four hours), travel all day long via plane and car, and arrive in South Carolina at 11:30 p.m. Needless to say, my 7+ month pregnant body is at its limit — or so I think. Could I really push it any more?

We arrive at said sister-in-law’s house and collapse into bed. Two hours later, Marti and Ben are both sick, and Ben throws up in the bed. In the bed, that all three of us are sleeping in, in the middle of the night. I sleep in 2-hour intervals the rest of the night and wake up feeling sick too.

Day 2: We say good-bye to Ben and drive to Columbia, fly to Atlanta, spend 4 hours in Atlanta and then another 3 hours on a plane to Boston. The entire time I can hardly carry my purse because my body is saying stop! stop! and I am having contractions — painful, real contractions. I cannot sleep, I cannot rest, and my body is freaking out.

So we get to Boston and think, we should really take a cab to the bed and breakfast. But we ask at information and they say, thirty-five dollars. Thirty-five dollars?! We ignore the fact that this is about 3% of the cost of the plane tickets for this trip. Never mind that it is 8:30 p.m. and I have hardly slept for two days. Ignore the fact that my stomach is churning and I am still having contractions with any physical exertion at all, and I am at a dangerous 31 1/2 weeks. Marti and I both agree we should definitely take the subway.

I think we may be secretly suicidal.

So we take a bus to the subway, where I stare down some kid with a knife scar across his face and what is clearly a gang sign in his back pocket. He keeps looking at me, and I’m like, oh yeah? You wanna spar with the pregnant lady? Come here and let me show you my kyokushinkai karate moves, punk. Don’t mess with this Idaho farm girl (well, I didn’t really live on a farm, but oh well). At least I mean this with my stare. Wisely, I say nothing, and try not to be nervous when he appears at the next train, in the same car. At this point, in between contractions, I think to myself, you dumb blankety-blank. You are pregnant and exhausted and should not be antagonizing adolescents. This is why I should live in the country. The back country, where punks are few and farm boys are many. One girl described this trait of mine very well just a couple of weeks ago — having an alligator mouth and a canary butt. I will write about this trait again later.

So we make it to the bed and breakfast without getting mugged, no thanks to me (incidentally, Marti notices none of this silent staring match). It is just a 2-block walk from the subway after our second transfer. We transfer trains. By which I mean we lug our bags up stairs and escalators and more stairs, and at the last I am so exhausted I let go of my huge brown bag on the escalator and watch it go thump - thump - thump down to the bottom, where it climbs a few feet and then - thump - goes back down. I hobble down after it as best I can (it’s hard to go down an up escalator, even when you’re not hugely pregnant) and finally catch the handle and tug it up after me. And then we walk a few blocks and there is the bed and breakfast. It is two flights of stairs up to our room, and no elevator. Of course.

But why would we do things the easy way? That’s no fun. We don’t even go to sleep right away. We drink herbal tea and read the paper and in general savor the fact that it is just us, for a minute. In fact, we end up having a whole 24 hours of “just us” time before tragedy strikes. But that’s for another post.

I will try to get Boston pictures up tomorrow.