We’re back on the road again. After an entire week off the bicycle to visit family in Minnesota and to attend the AADE conference in Los Angeles, California, I’m back on the bicycle today.

We flew back to Minneapolis from Los Angeles on August 12. Yesterday, we spent the day in the Minneapolis area running errands. Errands like putting two new tires on the BayerMobile. While we were in Minnesota, we decided to get the oil changed in the car and while we were doing that, we noticed that the front two tires were looking pretty worn. With the new tires on, Pat says it drives much nicer now too.

We drove to Austin, Minnesota yesterday afternoon in preparation for riding today. This morning, we drove right by the SPAM Museum. If you grew up eating SPAM for breakfast, lunch, or dinner like I did, it’s a must-see museum.

Taking a week off the bicycle really upset the routine that I had established for getting ready for a ride. I had forgotten where a bunch of my stuff was. For example, sunglasses, gloves, water bottles, and bicycling shoes. I could still ride without sunglasses or gloves, but not knowing where my bicycling shoes were gave me a start. I had a short moment of panic as I considered the implications of having forgotten them at my brother’s house in Plymouth, Minnesota (a two-hour drive to the north). To my relief, they were buried in a box filled with other bicycling stuff (like my sunglasses and gloves) in the back of the van. All of this relearning where equipment was gave us a late start this morning.

Another reason for our late start was an unexpected infusion site change due to what was clearly a problem at my infusion site. I went to bed last night at about 10 PM with a blood sugar of 114. I woke up about 3 AM after some very strange dreams. I had a blood sugar of 204. I dialed in a correction bolus of 2 units to account for my blood sugar being 104 mg/dl over my target level of 100 mg/dl. I also thought that maybe the lack of exercise in the past week might have resulted in the need to bump my basal rates up a bit, so I also raised my basal rates by 0.05 units per hour (the smallest increment possible on my insulin pump). My nighttime basal rate is now 0.7 units/hour. I think that’s as high as it has ever been for my entire eleven years on an insulin pump. Could it be another case of my insulin losing it’s potency due to exposure to heat? Not likely. I picked up this insulin on July 19 which is not even four weeks ago. The insulin I use is supposed to be stable at room temperature for up to 28 days and I know I’ve kept this supply at less than 55 degrees since picking it up at the pharmacy. And I know 55 degrees is the maximum temperature because I’ve been storing my insulin with a digital thermometer that has a display showing the maximum temperature. With that in mind, I discounted the possibility that my insulin was going bad and I went back to bed thinking the problem was solved. When I woke up this morning at about 6:30 AM, my blood sugar was still 190 mg/dl. I wasn’t due for a site change for another day, but I decided to go ahead and change it so I could eliminate it as a possible source of the problem. We’ll see how it goes tonight.

We’re camping tonight! This is something we haven’t done since we were passing through Pennsylvania — two months and 2200 miles ago. We haven’t been camping because it’s been really hot and campgrounds have been hard to find. (I have other excuses too, if you care to hear them.) Anyway, it has cooled off a lot since even a week ago when we were approaching Minnesota. When we saw the Clear Lake State Park on the map, we decided to check it out. We saw that it had our three required features for Dream Tour camping: electricity (for the laptop), running water, and showers.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 5:52 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Diabetes, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.