There are several of us that get motion sickness. Motorhome rides rank up there with boat rides and curvy mountain roads for making us feel sick. Before taking off on this adventure, I remembered Mythbusters
having an episode on motion sickness (Season 4 - Sea Sickness). I watched it with Les a couple of days ago - hoping they would prove SOMETHING worked as well as over the counter medicine. Hip hip hooray! They busted everything except for ginger capsules. Yesterday, I drove over to the store to look for ginger. I started looking for the capsules first (tea was going to be my second pick if I couldn’t find it in pill form) and found an herbal substitute for Dramamine! (We’re looking for something that won’t make us fall asleep when we take it.) I found “Motion Mate” by Nature’s Way. It has ginger, meadow sweet, peppermint, red raspberry, and hyssop.
My sister, my daughter, and I took the “Motion Mate” about 20 minutes before we left the house. An hour into the trip I asked the girls how they felt. Fine - including myself. Three hours into the trip, I started to feel queasy. I thought it was because I was addressing envelopes (I decided to live on the wild side and actually try doing something while on a drive - something impossible for me because I get almost instantaneously car sick that way). I had just completed my work when I started to feel a little sick and decided to stare at the road and hope it would go away - while making a mental note that doing anything on a road trip needed to be something I didn’t ever attempt again regardless. Unfortunately, staring at the road was not helping and I was feeling worse. Within 10 minutes, Niki told me she was feeling really sick (without me having said anything about myself). My sister immediately said she was starting to feel queasy also. Interesting. The herbs worked for 3 hours before wearing off. We took some more and shortly thereafter the queasiness went away.
There were no side effects such as sleepiness and as long as we took the herbs every 3 hours, we felt fine. Since this trip, I have also tried just plain ginger capsules
which work just as well. This is such a welcome alternative to myself and my family.
