The Accidental Detox Weekend

As noted in my previous post, this past weekend was a vacation. We left Thursday night after work and traveled to St. Louis. We spent the night with Mr. Goofy's parents and they kept Goofy Junior for the weekend. We headed off Friday morning to Missouri Wine Country.

My intent was to relax, de-stress, enjoy the company of some friends, eat well, drink some wine. As usual in the Goofy world, my plans got derailed.

Oh it started out well. Mr. Goofy and I landed at the Augusta Brewing Company for a microbrew and lunch. Mmmmm....I had a German-style Maibock beer. It was delicious. The lunch was not so great, but it was Friday afternoon at a place that really doesn't get busy until the 'true' weekend - Friday night - Saturday night. Our friends met us there and we proceeded to our first winery of the day.

So we are standing there at the first winery, sipping away, and I start to get the cold sweats. My stomach does a great big double roll and I get the shakes. This was WAY too early in the wine tasting to be anywhere near drunk (especially since I was pacing myself), so I was confused. I excused myself and went outside to sit down. It helped enough to get me to the next winery.

The next winery was awesome! Very cold inside, great wine, great hosts. As we were standing there sipping some yummy wine, I looked over and saw a Coke machine. Gads! Could it be Diet Coke withdrawl that I was going through? Still!!?!? It had been almost two weeks since I quit. But I couldn't think of another reason. But I was feeling better, so I plodded on.

Our last winery of the day was a small, out of the way place. The owner was this 70-year-old character, that took us downstairs to his cellar to taste some wine not even out of the stainless steel barrel yet! He talked our ears off, but we loved every minute of it. This guy had first tried making wine many years ago, and said it was "horrible. You could have cut it with a knife." But instead of giving up, he enrolled in UC-Davis to learn how to make wine. Years later, he is pulling in medals left and right for his wines, and selling out each bottling.

I should have been loving this experience, but I had this nagging ache in between my eyeballs, that was becoming hard to ignore. Since it was around 6:00pm (closing time for the wineries), we headed off in search of our B&B. We took a few 'detours' (we got lost) and finally made it there around 7:00pm.

At this point, I felt on the verge of death. I had two searing hot knives stuck in the corners of each eyeball (at least it felt like it) and my stomach was doing the wave. I couldn't decide whether my head or my stomach was going to implode first. I barely made it upstairs before passing out on the bed. A very worried Mr. Goofy did what he could until Grouchy Me told him to "get out!", so he went to dinner with our friends.

I re-surfaced around 9:30pm, feeling like I had slept about 20 minutes (in actuality about 2 hours!) and the headache was gone. I still felt very shaky but managed to eat some dinner that Mr. Goofy (Oh-Boy-Do-I-Love-Him!) brought me back from the home-made fried chicken place.

After all that, the next day I bounced out of bed and rode my bike 23 miles on the KATY trail.

So, did I detox the Diet Coke? Did I get a bad sandwich at lunch? Did I get really, really carsick? Spectulation ensued, but I don't think I'll ever know. I'm just happy to be back in the land of the living. And still aspartame-free!

NOTE: While surfing around for a link for the word "aspartame" (and trying to figure out how to actually spell this word), I found a plethora of links to sites about "aspartame detoxification" and "aspartame kills". Damn! Who knew!?!?