To quote the poor devil tossed onto the plague cart in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I’m not dead… I feel fine!”

I’m pretty sure I didn’t have the plague (having been subject to my hacking and wheezing, my family may beg to differ), but I was awfully sick last week. I’ll spare you the grisly details. Suffice it to say that several days of rest, my wife’s regimen of multivitamins and some good grog seems to have done the trick. I feel much better now. Well enough to avoid the plague cart, anyway.

I haven’t been sick all year, so I felt somehow overdue – and a bit grateful. Usually I end up catching some sort of bug while I’m on vacation, which makes the prospect of being ill much worse. I know I’m not alone in that, either. As much as we all love to travel, vacationing opens up all sorts of new opportunities for coming down with a cold or flu or some other nasty-sounding ailment, probably involving you and your stomach being very unkind to one another.

If you’re going to take a trip to the Black Hills (or, for that matter, anywhere else) this year, it never hurts to be prepared for an unexpected illness. Travelogger offers some good tips on putting together a first-aid kit for vacations. It doesn’t have to be very complicated – bandages, aspirin and the digestive-system triumvirate (Pepcid, Pepto and Tums) are good staples. You should also consider where you’re going and the time of year, too. For instance, if you’re planning on spending several hours hiking in the Black Hills or Badlands this summer, a tube of sunblock is a wise choice. Anyone planning to spend several days outdoors in South Dakota should also think about packing some insect repellent, anti-histamines and anesthetics for bug stings and bites, and a cortisone cream for poison ivy.

I’m not particularly accident-prone when I travel, but I have a few friends who are. Stories range from car accidents to nearly falling off cruise ships. If you fall into this category, you might be in the habit of checking the locations of pharmacies and hospitals before you head off on vacation. There are smaller hospitals in Custer, Spearfish, Deadwood-Lead and Sturgis, with two major hospital facilities in Rapid City. Nearly every town has a clinic and a pharmacy, including national chains like Walgreens, Sav-On/Osco, Medicine Shoppe and Medicap. You can pull up maps and directions pretty quickly on Google Maps.