The Family Bike Touring Guide

I thought I’d post a quick update as everyone is up super early today, and not for good reason.

After our amazing pizza experience last night we headed back to our accommodation and, thanks to a good WiFi connection, the kids and I spent an hour or so watching Netflix while Lara got an early night.

Before bed I decided to turn on the air condoning unit as it was still quite warm outside. 18 degrees seemed like an acceptable temperature. I made myself a quick coffee using the supplied funky Senseo machine and headed to bed.

Waking at around 2am to the sound of Lara heading to the loo, I commented that it was good that her cough had not returned overnight, but then, within an hour, all hell appeared to break loose.

By 2am, Lara’s cough had returned with a vengeance and now there were coughs and splutters coming from the room upstairs too. Surely her cough wasn’t spreading to the kids?

Sure enough, for the next 5 hours, I woke frequently to the cough chorus, as if someone had added different “cough” audio samples to an electronic drum machine and was now playing it loud and relentlessly with no sense of rhythm or respect for the night.

And then, at around 6am, I awoke to a different sound – the sound of Zak being “unwell”, shall we say, in the bathroom. Nothing serious, but clearly it knocked him a little and spent a while sitting quietly with us (apart from the coughing) before returning to the bathroom once more. And we remained in this cycle for another hour or so.

It was during this time that I had a realisation – every evening of coughs this week has been immediately preceded by extended time using air conditioning. We used the a/c in the car extensively on the drive down, and then again last night. Maybe this is the problem. On turning off the a/c a while ago I realised that maybe I had contributed to the problem too…

Air con units are renowned for sucking all the moisture out of the atmosphere, and can therefore make your throat very dry and cause you to cough. Maybe the antidote could be steam, I thought. So I went to boil some water in a pan, hoping that might help. That’s when I noticed something odd. Before I’d noticed the Senseo machine last night I had started to boil some water on the stove to make a drink. Seeing the Senseo, I had completely forgotten about the water on the stove and it transpires that I’d left it heating all night, right under the a/c unit.

So our air con unit had been working overtime all night in an attempt to cool down the room that I had accidentally, in effect, left on full heat for the whole time. This was made even more apparent when, shortly after turning off the stove and a/c unit, I was pelted by a storm of ice as it flew everywhere from the a/c. Zak thought I had smashed a glass, there was so much ice everywhere. Not a great start to the day, but at least we have something of an explanation for all the coughing last night.

Fortunately, Zak is now feeling a lot better and, although still quiet, I think he’ll be back to his normal self by the time we head out later. Lara has spent the last 20 minutes using her Fitbit to help her relax and has managed to get her heart down from 112 to 86bpm, so that’s clearly effective.

And now we get a nice easy day outside in the fresh air. Only 20 miles of cycling to do with very few climbs, so it should be a positive experience all round.

More updates later, and hopefully with more uplifting and positive stories.