An illness or injury can spoil your day wherever you may travel.
It can even kill you.
And worst case, it might cut short your travels and cause you to lose your deposit.
Being prepared should be first and foremost.
Having health insurance that will be accepted from Aruba to Zimbabwe is a good first step.
And staying in relatively good physical condition while eating as well as possible given the locale and watching where you step, all rate fairly high on the common sense rating scale.
I have pontificated on this topic in earlier posts but I won’t bore you with the requisite links to my previous postings on the subject: the thousands of you who are regular readers have already read them.
This morning I was participating in my contribution to green travel while aboard a public mass transit vehicle—a.k.a. a bus.
When I arrived at my appointed destination I stepped out the door to find a strategically placed hazard—the mother of all clichés of dangerous fruits—that surely was placed by someone in desperate need of early morning entertainment.
Yes, yes, damn it to hell…it was a banana.
His Highness Almighty of Klutziness. Yup, guilty as charged!
As I found myself slipping into the awkward body position of being sprawled out on the sidewalk you can guess what my first concern was: did anybody see this embarrassing incident?
As I just got off an almost full bus onto a crowded street there were dozens of anybodies bearing witness.
So I did what most guys with an easily bruisable ego would do-
I sprung up as if catapulted off of a Mission Accomplished aircraft carrier and went immediately into a brisk walk the hell away from the scene without further examination for scraped skin or even worse—at least when I have face my wife who has witnessed the result before—torn pant knees.
In this case I landed more on my hands than on my knees but for some reason I seemed to suffer no apparent scrapes or bloody palms.
Well, as it were I was carrying a lunch in my contribution to green food transport—a.k.a. a cloth lunch bag.
And a little while later I happened to notice some creamy, white liquid on one hand—the hand that was carrying the cloth lunch bag.
When I peered inside the bag I noticed everything was covered in the same creamy, white liquid, which lead to the discovery that the base of my plastic yogurt container was split wide open with its contents spewed throughout the bag.
So, in retrospect, I guess my yogurt sacrificed itself as a form of a culinary air bag.
And while the salient ingredient of the yogurt might have been better utilized in a rum-laden Piña Colada—which I could have used about then—in this case I was saved from further injury by a pineapple.
Truly I was taken down by one tropical fruit to be saved by another.
Clearly the moral of this story is to prepare for the worst, plan for contingencies and watch where you place you feet.
And carry a tub of yogurt.
