No, seriously.
I have a long and storied history with foot and ankle injuries. I've had 29 ankle sprains and 6 broken toes in my lifetime. I have a horrible habit of wearing the I wrong shoes that'll lead to really awful blisters and pulled muscles in my foot. And because I'm an idiot, I basically go "Oh well," and keep on going.
Be smarter than me.
If I give you any advice on footwear you should actually take, it's this:
-No flip flops if you're walking long distances. It just won't be comfortable.
-Get insoles. The right ones can be magic.
-DO NOT WEAR NEW SHOES ON A TRIP. Make sure they're broken in and have given you all the blisters they're gonna give you.
-Carry band-aids or moleskin on your person just in case.
-There are also tubes that look like Chapstick that you can put on your feet as a second skin in the areas you usually get blisters that actually really help. The brand I use is Sole Goddess, but I've also seen them from Dr. Scholl's.
-If you're me, the ankle wrap never leaves your carryon, just in case.
Now for some stories I can tell about how I did not follow these rules and it sucked:
-I went to DC in 2010 and fell- twice- on the previous Wednesday, spraining my foot so badly I thought it was broken and I couldn't go. I went anyway. I had to walk the Mall, get through Dulles Airport, and ride a crowded Metro on my tiptoes for an hour because the only place I could fit was somewhere with the overhead rails with two wraps on my foot to keep it stable.
-When a friend came out to visit a couple years ago and we went to Disneyland, I figured my shoes were good because they were new, but hadn't given me any trouble over the last week. The day we were there, I had blisters that needed treatment within half an hour of arriving, and my the end of the day my shoes had blood all over them. I lasted eight hours in them. (And to be fair, after this they turned out to be amazing for this kind of thing.)
-I figured that a certain pair of flip flops had gotten me around downtown Chicago and I wore them to my first SDCC in 2010. I underestimated the walking involved, and somehow just in the train station the thong part had cut in between my toes and were killing my feet. Also our hotel was two miles away and our only option was to walk up and back.
-Thanks to a spill at Target I fell a few days before my cross-country move and sprained both my left ankle and right knee. I lived on the second floor and had to move everything I owned like that, plus drive for ten hours a day.
Anyway, doing anything while you're hurt sucks. It sucks more when you're somewhere new, trying to see everything you can and you have something that's taking your attention away from it. So take precautions, take care of yourself, and be better than me.
True story: Our Northeast trip came at a time in my life where something about my feet meant that I was just DESTROYING shoes at a terrifying pace, sometimes buying new cheap ones every couple months because my big toe would carve holes in them that quickly. I bought new cheap shoes less than a week before the trip. They were WONDERFUL. Within a week after the trip, they were completely falling apart. I needed to use rubber bands at work to make it through their final day. That trip destroyed those shoes. It was kind of poetic. Not a good poem. But still.
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