Alas, talk of RA can only go so far and we moved onto movies, books, and good old-fashioned gossip about the comings and goings of people in academia. We passed the city where Van Gogh painted and the area where some of my favorite Languedoc wine originates. Through the van window I could feel the terroir.
A VW is supposed to have fahrvergnügen, but Salvatore kept to the speed limit and the kilometers passed slowly. One in our group had an iPhone and periodically gave us a precise update of our location. Nearly 900 kilometers to Madrid was better than 1,229 kilometers, but it was no great solace that the van would be our home for many hours to come.
CONGRATULATIONS!
“Rheuminations” won a bronze 2010 American Society of Healthcare Publication Editors award for best column.
As evening approached, we passed the Spanish border, which was a very informal affair, with far less scrutiny than the road blocks that our local gendarmes in Durham set to “check registrations.” In the twilight, we played our game of geography, but I bowed out when I didn’t know that Susquehanna ends in an a and not an h.
Time was moving slowly, but, as I will relate in my next column, excitement awaited in the Spanish mountains. Then, we will get on to the relevance of this odyssey to rheumatology. Patience, dear reader, we will eventually get there.
Dr. Pisetsky is physician editor of The Rheumatologist and professor of medicine and immunology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.