Healthy Travels: What you Need to Know

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Why a series on Healthy Travels? If you have ever been sick while you are traveling, you know it can seriously ruin your holiday. All your best laid plans, shattered as you sit in your hotel room (or worse).

Healthy Travels What you Need to Know www.compassandfork.comThe Healthy Travels Series

But rather than dwell on what could go wrong, the goal of this series is to help you make sure your holiday goes right! The complete Healthy Travel series will look at

Healthy Travels is one multi-part series we have started on Compass & Fork, and the other multi-part series is about Planning your Dream Trip. Together we hope to get you out there traveling in 2016 and make sure you stay healthy and have a great time while you are there.

For those of you following along from the comfort of your own kitchen, maybe we can tempt you to travel in 2016 or in the not too distant future. Another series about Eating and Cooking Healthy, is coming but won’t start until 2016.

Why Healthy Travel?

Healthy Travels What you need to know www.compassandfork.comMark and I have traveled extensively around the world and always been relatively lucky that we have never really had a major incident or become seriously ill or hurt. Yes we have had incidents. Both of us have been victims of petty theft (me: jewellery ripped from my neck, Mark pick-pocketed). Thankfully neither of us was hurt, and the local police recovered my jewellery.

I hurt myself boarding a train with luggage. Quite badly as it turned out. I had to go to the hospital. This was in Italy. The doctor did not speak fluent English, I speak very little Italian. We managed. I ended up on crutches for 3 weeks. Luckily after the 3 weeks I was able to walk. I spent almost a year recovering and we celebrated by hiking Machu Picchu (coming to the blog in January).

Having been on crutches while traveling, then having rehab and lots of strengthening and endurance training to to return my knee to full strength, makes me feel lucky my knee recovered to normal function. Lots to be thankful for over what was a really dumb accident.

The whole incident was a good reminder of how important maintaining your fitness is. While neither of us is going to win a fitness contest, we do try to stay fit and healthy enough to be able to undertake our favorite activities: hiking, skiing and whatever else we might have the opportunity to do while we travel. Some of those have included kayaking, snowshoeing, horseback riding and even paragliding.

We have had a couple of family emergencies where we have had to travel unexpectedly at short notice. Unfortunately for a serious illness and a couple of deaths in the family.

All of these incidents are things way outside of your control and it helps to have some idea of how you might manage if these issues arrive.

And of course who could travel without ever becoming sick. Yes, after traveling to over 50 countries and extensively for work we have had our fair share of illness on the road. We are careful but it still happens.

So in this series we are going to have a look at what you can do to stay healthy so you can enjoy your trip!

The next post in this series is about what you need to know about trip insurance. Since you need to organize this before you depart, you should have a think about this before you first book your tickets or trip. We will start there.

Until next time, good health to you all.

Healthy Travels What you Need to Know Tetons www.compassandfork.com

 

Healthy Travels What you Need to Know Series www.compassandfork.com

12 Responses

  1. Meghan Ramsey
    | Reply

    Yes! It’s so easy to forget what we do at home to stay healthy when we are traveling. Getting sick on a trip is the worst!

    • Editor
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      And often taken for granted that nothing can ever go wrong.

  2. Manju | Cooking Curries
    | Reply

    Yes, the last thing you want when travelling is to fall sick, especially when you are travelling with a child. Great post!

    • Editor
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      Yes it is something we take for granted. It can be a slightly disorientating trying to fathom how health systems work in foreign countries. Thanks for your comment.

  3. Shobha
    | Reply

    OMG, I completely agree with this. We travel as a family mostly and I have had several experiences with sick kids on the road. The easiest incident we had was a vomiting virus which cleared up after a couple of days and the toughest was a broken arm which last the full month of our trip. I would never travel without insurance!!

    • Editor
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      Shobha, sorry to hear about the broken arm. You just never know what is around the corner. Insurance does give you peace of mind and is particularly important if you are doing something active or going to remote places. Thanks for your comment.

  4. christine
    | Reply

    Its so hard to stay healthy when traveling!! Both food and fitness.. I try my best but I think food is the hardest depending where you are.

    • Editor
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      You’re right about that. We do enjoy eating out but we also like to cook with the local, market ingredients. It helps keep the cost down and it is easier to control what you are eating. Thanks for your comment.

  5. I’m really luck that – touch wood – I’ve never had to use my travel insurance abroad, but I’d never risk it. I’m over the whole bulletproof 20-something phase after doing some marketing for an international health insurance broker, now that I actually understand why people need to be covered! Well done for informing people on such an important topic.

    • Editor
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      You just never know do you? We hike a lot in some remote places. We have been lucky hiking but it is easy to see how mishaps occur. Thanks for your informative comment.

  6. Jackie Sills-Dellegrazie
    | Reply

    Ugh! Getting sick while traveling stinks! My husband had gotten sick on past travels and it really derailed some of our plans. Travel insurance is always a good thing. You don’t want to need it, but you’ll be glad you do if something happens.

    • Editor
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      Exactly Jackie, don’t leave home without it! This is especially true the longer your trip is. Thanks for your comment.

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