Published: October 30, 2009 02:23 pm      

Keeping a leg up on traveling | TOM LAVIS

BY TOM LAVIS

TLAVIS@TRIBDEM.COM

It was a trip my wife and I had anticipated for months.

We took a vacation to visit our youngest son, Mike, who lives in northern California.

The trip was different from the others we have made west. This time, we had a 9-month-old granddaughter waiting to greet us.

This would be a good time to mention that prior to the California trip, I spent a week in Canada fishing.

Near the end of the outing, I slipped on a dew-covered boat dock and twisted my right leg.

But when a man is fishing, the pain doesn’t matter.

There was a week between trips, and my right knee started to ache like a bad tooth when I returned home.

“You’re limping around here like a three-legged dog,” my wife said. “Go to the doctor.”

I weighed my options. Suffer as best I could until I returned from California or go to a doctor and discover I needed immediate surgery to repair a torn ligament.

Three words came to my mind: Nonrefundable airline tickets.

I admit that each step was agonizing, but it wasn’t as painful as if I had missed the flight.

The flight was uneventful. Fortunately, I had an aisle seat on each of our connecting flights, which enabled me to stretch my leg while tripping other passengers on their way to the restroom.

Our arrival gate was about a quarter of a mile from the baggage claim, so my limp got increasingly worse as we hiked.

We were met by our son who asked if anyone else on the plane besides me had been injured on the flight?

We spent the next two days getting acquainted with our granddaughter and the pain eased.

On the third day, my son announced that we were going to the redwood forest as per my request.

He was right. Several weeks prior to our visit, he called to ask if there was anything we wanted to see this trip and I said the redwoods.

My knee twinged.

We headed for Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz mountains.

It’s home to the largest continuous stand of ancient coast redwoods south of San Francisco.

“The park has over 80 miles of trails,” my son said.

He let me choose the route since I was a little lame.

It turns out, I should have taken the path back to the car instead of hiking into the canyon.

As the pain reached its apex, I inquired about how much farther to the car.

“We are standing exactly at the halfway point,” my son said as he checked the path markers.

What started out with me acting like Henry David Thoreau embracing every tree, degraded to a point of me doing my best Quasimodo imitation.

Someday when my granddaughter asks who was the crooked man holding her by the giant redwood tree, they can simply say The Hunchback.

By the time I got back to the car and said a prayer of thanks for allowing me to survive, it felt as if someone had driven a pointy redwood limb into my knee.

Thankfully, my granddaughter doesn’t crawl, so I spent the next three days on the floor teaching her to use all fours while keeping me grounded.

Upon my return home, what I thought was a ligament tear turned out to be arthritis.

Either way, it is a pain in the limb.