Over Columbus Day weekend, after wrapping up week five of our Bosnian language class, V and I took a short road trip to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. To celebrate my birthday, V had rented a cabin in the woods. We were looking forward to a little getaway surrounded by nature, with hiking, winery visits, the changing of fall leaves, and explorations of small-town Virginia on the agenda. We eventually made it and had a wonderful time, but first, we had a slight detour to the ER.
As I mentioned previously, I came down with a severe case of food poisoning at the beginning of week five that caused me to miss one day of class. Although I started feeling better overall within a day or so, I continued to experience some unusual symptoms. These prompted me to follow up on the lab work my primary care physician had ordered in September, after I returned from Burma, to check for parasites or H. pylori. I didn’t have an answer yet, but I went into the weekend really looking forward to our getaway.
The Friday before I’d met up with a colleague for coffee after class and then tried out a new massage place near our apartment in the evening. So Saturday morning dawned without us being totally prepared to leave, but as we’re both pretty efficient in the morning we were able to quickly pack, load the car, and hit the road before 8:30 a.m. We only had about 90 minutes to drive, give or take depending on traffic, so there was no particular hurry.
What strikes me in retrospect is how completely normal I felt that morning. I ate what is for me a typical breakfast—as I recall, yogurt, coffee, and a hard-boiled egg. But about 40 minutes into the drive, I began experiencing severe abdominal spasms. The only other time I’d felt anything similar was several hours after my bout of food poisoning. What made that first episode particularly memorable was that I actually cried out in pain, something I’ve hardly ever done in my life. Fortunately, those spasms subsided within an hour and hadn’t recurred in the four days that followed.
But on Saturday morning, while we were driving, it soon became clear that we needed to pull over. We stopped in a grocery store parking lot, where I spent about 25 minutes getting sick in the bathroom and found it difficult to leave. Even once I walked back to the car, I couldn’t do more than pace back and forth next to it. Every seven or eight minutes, I was overcome by severe spasms that felt like contractions, doubling me over in pain. At that point, I had to face the reality that I couldn’t continue the trip—not because I was afraid, uncomfortable, or being a wuss, but because I was experiencing genuinely incapacitating pain that felt like a medical emergency. I wondered if something crazy like an appendix rupture was taking place. We therefore decided to drive to the nearest emergency room, which, fortunately, was only five minutes away. I climbed into the passenger seat while V drove us there. I was in tears in the doorway of the hospital and seconds later was in a wheelchair being attended to.
I was in the ER for only about three hours and was already beginning to feel much better by the time I left. My CT scan revealed serious inflammation of the stomach and intestines (acute gastroenteritis), presumably related to the food poisoning I’d experienced a few days earlier. It felt very validating that there was demonstrable, concrete evidence that a doctor could actually see to explain what I was experiencing. I wasn’t going to accept that it was all in my head or that it had been random pain I simply failed to manage. I declined a prescription for pain medication but ultimately agreed to take anti-nausea medication.
V assumed we should head back to Arlington, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I was eager to get to our cabin and go for a walk in the woods. A small part of me worried about being somewhere remote in case my symptoms worsened; I had to acknowledge that what had happened wasn’t something I could have simply “powered through.” Still, I felt reasonably confident about continuing with the weekend, a decision that ultimately proved to be the right one.
After a quick stop in Mt. Jackson for Mexican food (which was probably a little diabolical after what I’d just lived through!), we headed the rest of the way up to the cabin to check it out. I was delighted by the way the highway turned into narrow mountain lanes and eventually into gravelly roads through the forest. The cabin itself turned out to be, by far, the cleanest and most comfortable Airbnb I’d stayed in over my 14 years of using the platform!
On Sunday, it rained all day so we decided to spend some time looking around Mt. Jackson. First we visited a historic covered bridge called Meem’s Bottom Covered Bridge. Crossing the North Fork of the Shenandoah River, the bridge was built between 1893 and 1894. However, it wasn’t the first covered bridge at this location. An earlier bridge was reportedly burned by Stonewall Jackson’s forces in 1862 during the Civil War. Two replacement bridges were subsequently washed away by floods in 1870 and 1877. The bridge was rebuilt again in 1878 and then in 1894. That final bridge still stands today, despite an attempt by vandals to burn it down almost exactly 50 years ago, on Halloween night in 1976.
Mt. Jackson, VA
Afterward, we stopped by The Winery at Kindred Pointe. With its cozy couches, vineyard views through the windows, and hot mulled wine, it was the perfect spot for a rainy afternoon. However, we were hungry, and since the menu offered only prepackaged snacks, we headed instead to Cave Ridge Vineyard for a leisurely lunch and a wine flight.
The following day, the holiday Monday, was my actual birthday and also our travel day back to Arlington. However, since the drive was relatively short and the weather was considerably better than the day before, I wanted to squeeze in a hike and continue making progress on my Trail Quest project. We ended up spending my birthday hiking a few hours south at Natural Bridge State Park, our first Virginia state park visit of 2026.
I started the project in 2020 with the goal of visiting all 44 of Virginia’s state parks, inspired by my friend D that completed Trail Quest several years ago. So far, I’ve visited 12 parks, with 32 still to go! I think V has accompanied me on about half of those. I didn’t visit any parks for the challenge in 2021, 2022, or 2025, but I’m hoping to make significant progress toward completing Trail Quest before we leave for Sarajevo. I’ve written about my first three state park visits here (Mason Neck in 2020, and Sky Meadows and Leesylvania in 2023), followed by the next four here (Culpeper Battlefields, Seven Bends, Douthat, and Shenandoah River, all in 2024). I haven’t yet written about the four other parks I visited in 2024—Widewater, Staunton River Battlefield, Staunton River, and Occoneechee—but I’ll cover those in an upcoming post, along with some thoughts on Natural Bridge State Park.
All in all, it was a wonderful birthday weekend. Once I returned to Arlington, I began looking for answers about my gastrointestinal problems, trying to determine whether they were a short-term consequence of the food poisoning or a lingering effect of my time in Rangoon.
