Allergic to Nevada

This past friday, the BF and I had to drive my son up to Nevada to see his dad for spring break. We're picking him back up again this coming Sunday... *sigh* But anyway... I was fine for most of the 6 hour trek (including stops, mind you. If we'd driven straight through, it would only have taken 4 and a half hours).

Fine through the central valley, fine through the foothills, fine through most of the mountains -- until we got over 4500ft, when I started getting elevation sickness -- but then we crossed the state line, and headed down out of the mountains, into the desert. And I do mean DESERT.

For those of you who have never been to any part of Nevada, or any part of Nevada other than Reno or Las Vegas -- the entire state of Nevada is nothing but dust and very very low scrub brush. There are no trees. There is no grass. There are no streams, no rivers, no wildflowers or puffy happy shrubs.

You know the saying "I'm in the middle of BFE"? Well, Nevada embodies BFE. Bum Fucking Empty.

So we enter BFE... And the humidity drops to oh, say, negative 75% (yes, an exaggeration, but I really don't see how the air could have gotten any drier). For me, who finds the bay area too dry (averages 35% humidity), this additional drop in moisture was too much for my poor poor respiratory system.

It was as if someone had taken my sinuses, microwaved all the water out of them, then balled up some barbed wire, and stuffed that into my head. My chest hurt from trying to breathe all the dust.

And we were still not at our destination.

Our destination required us to drive through a one stop light piss poor excuse of a town, drive another 15 miles or so through an even smaller piss poor excuse of a town, then drive 5 miles to the ONLY stop sign for 20 miles, go off the paved road, drive past what seemed to be a junk yard, to try and find one lone house in the middle of... well... BFE.

The drive there was somewhat interesting, what with the kamakaze jack rabbits and high wind warnings, and being scared to death the car would break down in the middle of nowhere, with no cell service and the getting a little bit lost because apparently mapquest doesn't know the difference between left and right in Nevada, and all (I was having those waking nightmare hallucination things I get when I'm too stressed out)... But that was more hare-raising (haha, sorry, couldn't resist) than enjoyable, and the whole time I'm saying over and over: oh my god. oh my fucking god. there is NOTHING out here. Nothing! oh my god.

Not that I don't like the middle of nowhere. I do. But I prefer my middle of nowhere to be... Well... Tree covered. With water sources that don't require a half mile of drilling to get to. And wild animals that you can kill for food if you get stranded. Not the kind of middle of nowhere that has TUMBLEWEEDS and nothing else.

So yeah... We drop off the kiddo (and suffer through his dad trying to show off the pre-fab house they plopped down on their 5 acres of dust), and head back in to Reno to get dinner.

The moment I get out of the car in Reno, I have an asthma attack. Me, being the stubborn "no I'm not sick, I can handle this" kind of person that I am, I walked it off. Well, that and I was starving, and needed food, or I was going to keel over anyway. So I basically couldn't breathe. And someone had decided that on top of the barbed wire in my head, they were going to detonate a shrapnel grenade too...

Needless to say I had a hard time eating dinner. And I was miserable. Even just the short walk to the restroom left me gasping for air for a good 10 minutes. So it was a good thing the BF wasn't the least bit interested in Reno (he and I are both too intelligent to fall for slot machines with flashy lights on them). We got back on the road, and didn't stop until we were well back across the California border.

Guess what? 5 minutes after we got back into California... The barbed wire and shrapnel miraculously disappeared. The asthma went away. I could breathe again.

And given that last time I was in Nevada (Las Vegas), I wound up in the ER with full blown pneumonia after being there for 24 hours...

I've decided that I am allergic to Nevada. The entire state.