Four times a day, I take a little plastic pill-box of supplements from a vintage ‘train case’ that hold 6 days’ worth of pills for breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime. These supplements keep the worst of my Lyme disease at bay.

Esthetics in the pill storage routine do count, and this pretty case, sitting on a large ‘antique’ atlas (actually a storage box holding other, occasionally needed supplements) is something even Martha Stewart would admire!

On days when we won’t be ‘home’, (or we’re pulling our home behind us) I transfer the ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’ pill-box contents into small plastic bags, for swallowing with meals on the road.

On the seventh day, I replace these now empty 24 pill-boxes, with 24 full pill-boxes from a month’s worth of little pill-boxes stored in a second, larger, bin beneath the sofa.

Every thirty days, it’s pill-tray day. I line up all 120 of these now emptied little pill-boxes on trays wherever there’s an available horizontal surface. These little pill-boxes (found them at a dollar store) are a bit larger than I really need, but I’ve found them to be better than the largest standard pillboxes from the drugstore. I tried them all, but meticulously fitting all the pills in was like packaging a Whitman’s Sampler. With the larger, dollar-store boxes, I can drop all pills in without having to line them up so they’ll fit: cuts this packaging routine from 4 hours down to 2.5 on a good day.

You might ask, why do you load these in advance at all? Storing and opening 28 different pill bottles 4 times a day would be insane. I may be sick, but I do have a life.

I spread the 120 opened boxes out, then I drag out another large bin from deeper beneath the sofa, which holds the bottles of the 28 different supplements that have helped me get my life back. I carefully dole these out into their respective little pill-boxes, mindful that some pills interfere with others so must be taken at a different times.

Humidity is a problem in RVs, so once the 120 boxes are filled, snapped shut and properly stacked in their storage bin, I place several large desiccants in the bin with the boxes. Of course, the desiccants must be dried out monthly in the oven.

‘Pill-tray day’ is always an anxious time. I may be short some vital bottle, or a bottle may only have 10 day’s left. In that case, I break into the much larger bin of supplements in the truck and hope that I still have back-up there. If not, I’m out of luck. Once 120 boxes yawn open before me like baby birds, it’s not a good idea to leave them partly filled while I go search for a pharmacy. Even if I could, some of the more obscure herbals can’t be found at Rite-Aid, Walgreen’s, or CVS.

About 50% of what’s needed I order online, and then, when we’re on the road, the dilemma is: where can they be sent? That’s why the back-up trunk in the truck. Yes, pill-tray-filling day is always a bit anxious.

I’m a Lyme-brain-fogged amateur quartermaster whose ongoing health depends on my getting it right. Some months, I may go without something to find out whether it’s truly essential. Usually, I find it is. Last month, the total pills per day was 90, down from 130 a few months ago. This pill-tray day, the number will go up; some things I left out last month did make a difference.

Sigh.

I’m writing this because I’ve been using an app on my iPad that’s just terrific in storms. When on the road, we’re nearly always unfamiliar with the area we’re in. Storm warnings on weather radio are by towns, villages and counties which doesn’t do us much good if we don’t know where we are!

The app is called RadarScope. It brings real-time, raw feeds of weather service maps that include watch and warning boxes and text of alerts. But the best part is, because the iPad has GPS built-in, the app precisely locates our position on the map. We could tell very precisely when a rain blob would reach us and how intense it would be. We were very lucky this time, but if we’re ever in a tornado’s path, this app could give us the warning we would need to get out of the way.

The photo above is of the iPad screen and the other is a detail of our area. The blue circle with cross-hairs near Foley marks our GPS location. If you have an iPad or iPhone, take a serious look at this app. It’s just amazing.

Living in an RV requires lots of small extra steps to get through the day; like removing spare cooking pots from the microwave before using it, or pulling all of the plastic bins out of the closet to get to the warm sweater in the bottom bin. (There are only 3 drawers in the entire ePod.) The first few weeks on the road can be taxing until all these little extra routines shake down and become automatic. After that, the carefully memorized locations of things can be easily sabotaged if things are put back hurriedly, anywhere they’ll fit. Then it’s anyone’s guess where the can opener’s gone, or the biking gloves.

The great thing about our ePod is that it has so many nooks and crannies for stashing stuff. The awful thing about the ePod is that once stashed, or mis-stashed, an object can remain hidden for months at a time. At present, my little point-and-shoot ELPH camera has been hiding since Washington, D.C.!

My living with chronic Lyme disease, in an Airstream, on the road, is a whole second, tiring tier of routines: one that could prostrate even a healthy person at times. But to a Lymie, riding the roller-coaster of this complex disease, it can bring a melt-down of frustration and exhaustion at times. My favorite mug says, ‘Pretending to be normal day after day is exhausting.’ So I’ll drop the pretense and share from time to time.

I know some folks in my online Lyme groups are following our travels and these people are dear to me. Many are too ill for travel, and some are recovering enough to wonder how on earth it might be done. So here goes! Between lots of ‘normal’ travel adventures, I’ll write blog entries that delve into the litany of Lyme routines that are a large part of one Lymie’s life on the road.

For those lucky non-Lymie readers out there, I hope you’ll bear with me. The occasional “Elephant” blog entries to come aren’t really travelogue material, but they’re part of my journey.

Stay tuned.

As we were driving around, we crossed a small bridge that spanned a small body of water. The sign at the end of the bridge named this body of water–FLY CREEK.

A bit further along was another sign–for the FLY CREEK CAFÉ, “Find Your Happy Place”. We stopped for a mid-afternoon lunch, how could we not? It’s also a marina, so, we had a delicious lunch, with a great view. Boats on the water in January–ridiculous!

I had to show the waitress my driver’s license to prove we were from Fly Creek, NY. Ah, it’s great to be carded again.

Take a self portrait of course.

Now, time to get dirty again!

As soon as we’d unhooked the Airstream, Bill and Peggy pulled up in their golf cart–we’d met them at the Canopener. Looks like we’ll have a fun stay!

More details and photos tomorrow.

We asked about the turpentine farming that used to dominate this area over 50 years ago, and he told us where we might see ‘cat faces’: the slashed scars, like cat’s whiskers, remaining on some of the slash-pines on one of the trails.

When we asked about the prescribed burns of yesterday, he bounded out to his truck to bring his flame-pourer in to show us. The eco-system of this area of FL is fire-dependant, and what looks like misfortune is really absolute necessity for life. The short-needled sand pines hold on to their numerous, small round cones, and only release them after storms or fires, when they can safely reseed. They must land on the bare minerals of sand, not duff or pine-needles, in order to germinate.

Fires keep the underbrush open for the gopher tortoise, which is a surprisingly essential creature for all the other inhabitants of these dunes and woods. Whenever natural fires sweep through, all small reptiles and mammals go into truce mode and hide in the cool, safe gopher tortoise burrows which can be as long as 40 feet, only to re-emerge later to resume their prey-predator relationships.

Our enthusiastic ranger described how the deer will stand by and actually watch as they set the fires, eager to eat the first ashes, and later nibble the abundant new growth that quickly shoots up. Nature, it seems, is as tightly interwoven as ‘Ragtime’.

On our way out to one last day on the beach, we encountered our ranger, now sooty and helmeted, at the edge of a charred landscape beautifully layered in scrims of smoke. Unfortunately, the trails with the ‘cat faces’ had to remain closed as the fires were still smoldering in the roots, and smoking heavily.

Bruce got two pair of his favorite Rockport shoes, on sale, at the sprawling outlet mall in Destin, and then, while he got an overdue haircut, I shopped in Publix, rounding up the makings for a big hearty chili that could simmer and warm up the ePod and then us.

As much fun as it is ‘to strive to fill the unforgiving minute’, it‘s sometimes nice to dawdle through the mundane activities of life in warmth and sunlight, thinking of cold and snow with nostalgia.

Tide and wind had uprooted one of the two sturdy beach benches, and I set my back-pack beach chair in its lee, hunkered down with a couple of blankets. My windbreaker’s hood luffed, roared and chattered around my ears in positively arctic fashion, and I cinched it tight around my face and peered through its opening at the paperback in front of me.

Campgrounds have a lovely tradition of take-one-leave-one bookshelves, and when we first got here I’d turned in Jeff Shaara’s ‘Gods and Generals’ for E.L. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’. I’d enjoyed the interwoven stories of Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Freud, Wm. Howard Taft, Scott Joplin, Stanford White, Evelyn Nesbit, and other historical figures of the early 20^th century. This morning, I’d finished ‘Ragtime’ and turned it in for a British mystery, ‘The Lost Luggage Porter’. Now, out on Topsail beach, I assumed a British impermeability to weather, basked in the ocean’s negative ions, and let the wind turn each page as I finished it.

Way down the beach, Bruce roamed with the winds, leaning against them to steady himself to photograph, periodically wiping the salt of his lens. We had a glorious time.