Ginger

For as long as I can remember, I have been very prone to motion sickness. As a child, I needed only to say, "I don't feel so well" from the back seat of the car, and my parents would slam on the brakes and/or jam a bucket under my chin for the inevitable deluge. After a while, I learned that sleeping would keep me from being sick to my stomach, so I spent most car trips of over a few minutes in length asleep, stretched out on the back seat, since we didn't have booster seats Way Back Then.

As I've gotten older, it's gotten both worse and better. I don't tend to get carsick when I drive, and I've never noticed any tendency to get sick in planes or on any size of watercraft from a canoe up to a ferry. Most of the time if I am riding in a car and do start to feel queasy, I can fight it off and just feel miserable rather than actually being physically sick. Or I can fight it off long enough to fall asleep, which is quite easy for me to do thanks to the childhood Nap Conditioning of car trips. On the other hand, more types of roads make me sick than ever before. It no longer requires a hairpin road to make me ill; a parking lot or a bumpy road will work just fine. I now also become sick on roller coaster rides, carousels, and swingsets, for crying out loud. There's no way anyone would get me on the Teacup ride at Disneyland, thank you.

For a while I took Dramamine to combat motion sickness, but that requires a little pre-planning, as it's most effective if you take it more than an hour before you leave. In its favor, one dose tends to last me up to 48 hours and leaves me completely free of motion sickness to the point I can even read in the car. Unfortunately, even the non-drowsy formula tends to put me right to sleep, which is okay if I'm a passenger in a car but not great if I'm trying to ride a roller coaster.

Sometime this summer I finally decided to try a cure I'd heard about long ago but never investigated: ginger. I opted for crystallized (candied) ginger, some ginger chews, and some ginger candy to try various forms against one another. I also picked up some hot ginger lemonade. We gave it a try on a windy road out to the Oregon Coast, with me eating a couple of slices of candied ginger before leaving. Though I'm never going to eat candied ginger as a taste treat, it's not bad, and it has zero negative side effects. And it actually works. Doesn't last the 48 hours Dramamine or similar pills might; it lasts more like 6 hours. But it doesn't put one to sleep, it's inexpensive, and you can share it with anyone else who might be motion sick or even just peckish. The hot ginger lemonade was outstandingly good, but I can no longer find a source for it.

For anyone who wants to try the ginger route, I recommend going to an Import store and examining their selection of candies. I find mine at Cost Plus World Market, where I can get candied ginger, "Ginger Bears", ginger chews, pickled ginger, ginger ale and several other forms of ginger, some of which even tell you how much actual ginger is in the product. Even strong gingersnaps made with real ginger are effective. The trick is to be sure that the product contains substantial amounts of real ginger, not merely ginger flavoring. And if you really can't bear the taste of ginger, you can get ginger capsules in the Supplement aisles of some fancy supermarkets or vitamin shops, or you can make your own with ground ginger from the kitchen and gelatin capsules from the vitamin shop.

And as an added bonus, I have discovered that ginger works significantly better and faster for my heartburn than antacid tablets, and about as well as liquid antacids, without the potentially worrisome ingredients in the antacids. Wish I'd known that when I was pregnant!