First day of our annual vacation and we’d had a delicious brunch at the 45th Parallel (best breakfast spot ever); moved our car to our favorite shady parking spot and I’d taken a snap of our favorite vacation visual.

This waterwheel, which we love and as a bonus it makes a delightful chuggy, chuggy sound as it turns.

Then I did a braindead thing: I tripped, couldn’t catch my balance (damn you, infernal inner ear disease) and took an ugly fall, smacked down hard on the asphalt, rolled onto my back and just lay there hoping no one in a giant SUV was heading down the marina drive at that exact moment on account of that’s where I happened to be sprawled out.

Here’s the adventure part: I now know exactly where the hospital in Traverse City is. My right knee had a rather alarming and totally freaky bloop sticking out of one side so John fetched the car and off we went down the road to the emergency room so I could get an x-ray. The upside is that because we were on vacation the hospital was only 15 miles away and we were only at the hospital for 3 hours. At home the hospital is 40 miles away and the wait time to see a doctor would probably have been at least 3 hours.

The final result is that I didn’t break or tear anything and my knee will (eventually) heal on it’s own. The freaky bloop is still there (but smaller) and I’m still limping a bit (especially on stairs or steps). I also kinda messed up my right hand but it’s getting less painful and stiff and I can actually grip things this week. Most of the bruises are at least starting to fade and the scrapes are healing up.

We didn’t let this ruin our vacation. although we had to eliminate a couple of activities and it reduced our strolling speed to a gimpy crawl. We still had a really good relaxing time. As a karmic payback the weather was unseasonably and unexpectedly warm — really perfect actually.

More good news, I did manage to partially twist so I didn’t land directly on my face (face missed out on injury all together) and I did automatically jettison the skull bag at exactly the right moment so that the camera inside it did not sustain any damage (luckily neither did the bag). I’m only pissed that I didn’t manage to compensate enough to avoid anything more than scrapes and slight bruises. In case this whole paragraph sounds a little odd: I went through some training as a child to automatically react in certain patterns when in a falling-down situation so as to minimize injury (I think it’s still a first year requirement at Hoggwarts or maybe that was Jedi school — Ha!).

Next week: back to regular (ghastly thought; I almost typed normal) blog activities.