Recent Milestone at Coeur d'Alene Lake

Saturday was a treat for me, as my son and his family took me along for an outing at Coeur d'Alene Lake. I first saw the area about 40 years ago when I was traveling through with my dad and daughter. I was awestruck just seeing it from the highway, so I was anxious to get a closer look.




I sometimes hesitate to go along on things like this because I know I will, at the very least, slow others down, and maybe even more. But I felt like I really needed some clean, outdoor air, and more than I can get just going from bus stop to bust stop.
It was a lot more walking than I have done in a long, long time. We started out walking along the boardwalk, which really presented some challenges for me for a while. The floating bridge has a "calm side" and a "crazy side," with the waters being completely still on the harbor side and crashing on the lakeside. This made for a wobbly walk, and for a while my balance was playing tricks on me and I started to feel the beginnings of my least favorite symptom - the dreaded nystagmus/vertigo stuff. But I was able to keep my footing, though I nearly lost it once on the floating bridge. Important reminder to never do things like this alone.

The long walking bridge presented similar challenges, and my walking started to slow down considerably. When we reached the beach area the kids and the dogs were all having fun at the water's edge and I decided to just keep my slow pace going, rather than try to catch up. Lagging behind gave me a chance to get some pictures from a distance, which was nice.

Finally, I just sat on a ledge that separated the beach area from the sidewalk and park area and waited for them to come around again. By the time they were playing in the park, my legs had reached that stubborn point where they were refusing to move much at all. Even my Tim Conway "Oldest Man" walk was impossible at this point. So we found a place where I could wait with my son Jason and granddaughter Scarlet while Ericka brought the vehicle around.



Rather than seeing this as a defeat, I was very uplifted. I don't know how far we had walked, but we had been gone for 2-3 hours. I am estimating that probably 1.5 to 2 straight hours was spent walking. I haven't done anything like that since working my last part-time job at Petrow's Restaurant, where I would seat people over the 2-hr long lunch rush, and then my legs would quit. Once I would get home and stop, I would not be able to move much for the rest of the evening. I was really going downhill when I quit working there, and for the next year, I was doing well to walk a block or two before my legs would quit, so I saw it as a sign of progress to be able to walk almost continuously for almost as long as I use to do back then.

Then back home, to settle down for the evening, knowing that complete paralysis would soon be coming, and it did. It took me a day or two to recover, but I really saw it all as a milestone.