Christmas Miracles

Okay, I don't want to get all religious here, but this past Disney cruise convinced me that miracles do happen. In fact, no less than seven miracles happened on this trip. So let's go to the video tape:

Miracle #1 - Dinner seating (Okay, we will call this a quasi-miracle)
Disney, as well as most cruises ships, makes you sit with people, you don't know, at dinner so that you can socialize. This lasts for the duration of the cruise. Now, don't get me wrong. I like socializing, really, but after a long day in the sun, children and parents tend to be, well, a bit annoying. Dinner is the time to unwind, socializing is the last thing you want to do. Sometimes you get lucky and sit with someone you like. Other times, not so much. Take for example, the family we sat with on the last Disney cruise. It was a single father with his two daughters. The youngest daughter would fall asleep in her plate, literally, while the other one would not stop, talking. She drove me crazy! She would be asking me stupid questions about my shirt or something while her father ate all three dinners. I swear, those kids never had a chance to eat. Needless to say, we were not looking forward to meeting our dinner guests this time around. There are two seating times for dinner, 5:45 pm and 8:00 pm. Most parents want the earlier seating because their children need to be in bed by 8:30. Here's where the miracle comes in. Since Matthew is older now, we decided to changed our seating time to 8:00. This would give us a chance to digest all the other food that we've eaten during the day. As a result, we got our own table. I think we were the only ones on the ship with our own table. No annoying kids, no yelling parents just blissful dining, yeehah.

Miracle #2 - Broken Bus
In the previous blog entry, Susan mentioned that our tour bus broke down in Cozumel on our way from the Mayan ruins. Let me clarify why this was a miracle. Cozumel is a small Mexican island East of the Yucatan peninsula in the Western Caribbean. Only 35% of the island in inhabited, the other 65% is dense forest. In fact, our tour guide told us that there are probably many Mayan temples that have not been discovered yet because of this dense forest. Okay, now, we are stuck on a bus, on the remote side of the island. Yes, there was no electricity, bathroom, food, nothing but Iguanas. So, when the bus motor died, I thought, great, here we are stranded on the side of the road, 45 minutes away from town, in Mexico. We are not going to see the ship or civilization for hours. By the time I finished bitching to my self about the situation, another bus shows up. Holy crap! It took five minutes for the bus to reach us, in fact it didn't even delay our trip. Now you have to admit, that was a miracle.

Miracle #3 - Luggage
Disney can actually check you into the airlines and issue your boarding passes while you're still on the ship. Your luggage is identified with a tag that has all your flight information and they take it straight to the airport. That's Disney for you, you pay through the nose but you get great service. Anyway, I digress, since 9/11, the customs regulations have changed for disembarking the ship. In the past, we reported to the movie theater and everyone got customs approval at once. Now, you need to go through customs and find your bag as you would in an airport. Close to 1600 people disembark from the ship at once, given that an average family has four pieces of luggage you are talking about 6400 bags. Well, we go through customs quickly and begin looking for our bags. Guess what, no bags. We looked everywhere. There is no carousel like in the airport, just a giant room filled with 6400 pieces of luggage. To cover more ground Matthew and I went one way and Susan another. Well after a little panicking and lots of cursing Susan found one bag, in the corner of the room, without a tag on it. Apparently, the tags got ripped off during handling and would probably still be in Florida today if she didn't find it. Matthew found the other two pieces of luggage in a roped off area that was being loaded onto a truck for delivery to the airport. We informed the luggage handler and he placed a new tag on the bag and loaded it in the tuck. Finding one bag in 6400 pieces of luggage is pretty miraculous to me. Lets see if it makes it to LaGuardia.

Miracle #4 & 5 - Missed Connecting Flight

I used my frequent flyer points to fly to and from Florida. The whole flight for the 3 of us, was 30 dollars. Because of that, we had to fly south to Miami, get a connecting flight and then head North to Orlando and visa versa for the return trip. Stupid, right? Then again, what do you expect for 30 dollars? Going down was pretty uneventful. The return trip on the other hand, was not. We missed our connecting flight in Miami due to a delayed takeoff in Orlando. We landed, ran 10 gates which felt more like 10 miles, only to to have the agent close the doors before we could board. This is the same airline as the connecting flight, mind you, but apparently they could not hold the plane for 5 freaking minutes! Missing a flight is bad, but this was not the worst part. You see, a few days earlier the Northeast got pounded with 24 inches of snow. 10,000 flight were cancelled. Hundreds of people were stranded in the airport for days. So what do you think the chances were to get three standby tickets for the next flight? How about slim to none. Okay, it's Thursday night at 6:20 pm. The next confirmed seating the ticket agent could give us was Sunday, yes, I said Sunday. Well, here comes the cursing again which seems to be the only thing I could do at this point. I didn't want to piss off the ticket agent too much because she was the one getting me home. Matthew is panicking, Susan is strangely calm and I've resolved myself to the fact that we are going to be spending some time in this airport. Our standby flight was at 8:20 pm. I plant myself in front of the ticket agent, looking as pathetic as possible so she would not forget that I was there. Everyone boards, things don't look good, then suddenly they call out our names. Miracle #4! Not only did we get on this flight but all our luggage, including the one that Susan found, made it to LaGuardia. How do you like that. We'll count that one as miracle #5. In retrospect, I realized that If they did hold the plane for us to board in Miami, then our luggage would not have arrived in LaGuardia at the same time as we did. So if I have to be stranded in an airport then it might as well be Miami.

Miracle #6 & 7- Snow Removal

This is a bit out of sequence for the story but while we were out at sea, we found out about the snow storm back home. My driveway is 125 feet long on a steep hill so driving up it when there's snow is impossible. As soon as we could get a cell signal, we called our landscaper to plow the driveway. If you've read any of my previous blog postings you'd know that I usually do the snow removal myself. Why, you ask? probably because it involves a power tool. I'm still figuring that one out myself. Anyway, the landscaper informs us that he would like to help us but his plow has broken down. In desperation we asked if he knew someone that could help. He told us that he would check and get back to us, but the call never came. So I expected that we would get home after this hellacious night, have to park the car at the bottom of the hill and wade through 2 feet of snow. The luggage and snow can wait until the morning. It didn't matter anyway. All I wanted to do was sleep in my bed and for this day to be over. It's 2:00 a.m., we are exhausted, I drive up to the house and the driveway is plowed, Miracle #6. The final miracle was that a tree had fallen due to the intense snow storm and high winds and by all logic should have landed on the roof of the house based on it's location, but instead fell to the right, defying all laws of physics, Miracle #7

The next day we went out and bought power ball tickets hoping to ride the miracle train one more time but to no avail. I guess it was a bit greedy but it was worth a shot.

Christmas Holiday

We've been really busy the past few months and haven't been writing as much on the blog. We hit the holiday season with the usual mad rush of picking up gifts, mailing out the holiday cards and all the other zany things that happens with the holiday season. We hosted the Christmas holiday dinner the Saturday before we were leaving for our vacation, crazy I know. We were going to set sail and visit the Western Caribbean. We were pretty excited about this trip. School, work and other day to day activities have taken a toll on all of us. We were anxious to detach ourselves from email, voicemail and other daily obligations.

We had the usual suspects at the holiday bash. We had a roasted turkey and all the other side dishes that go along with it. As soon as I packed up the Christmas china and stemware, I pulled out the luggage for the frantic packing. Murphy's law, you know how it is. The way you want things to work out, never really does. The day before we were going to leave, I had planned to work at home. It was going fine until the call I was on pretty much summed up that I was needed in the office. I had to high tail myself down to New York and was stuck working at the office pretty late. OK- it's all good. We're leaving tomorrow. I can finish any packing in the morning before we leave. Nope. The day we were going to leave, I was tied up on conference calls all morning dealing with the last minute emergencies. Running around on the phone and trying to finish the packing didn't go as planned. I resolved myself to whatever is missing, I'll just deal without it. Ran out of the house, picked up Matthew from school, threw him in the car and high tailed ourselves to the airport.

We made it to Florida and I wasn't able to unwind. We were leaving from Port Canaveral on the Disney Wonder the next day and sailing to Key West. Nope, not feeling the "ah" moment yet. My mind was racing with a million things in my head to do for the office. I was worried about Matthew's midterm exams, Chinese homework assignments, Kumon assignments and all the other things that run around in my head. While we were in Key West, I was still able to see emails from work and though I was far away, I wasn't far enough.

We sailed to the next port. We arrived in Grand Cayman on Boxing Day. Not a great day to arrive on the island since it is a holiday. We didn't find a whole heck of a lot going on so we wandered back to the ship. OK- so my phone doesn't work, I don't have emails coming in. For that, I was beginning to feel a bit detached. So detached, that we didn't realize that a blizzard just dumped a ton of snow in the Northeast and screwed up air travel. Ignorance is bliss and I can surely attest to that.

We sailed off to the next location. Cozumel, Mexico. Now, we're talking. I'm now starting to unwind a bit, catch up on a lot of reading and took a historical tour through San Gervasio,one of the largest Mayan ruins. Not bad. Got a lesson on history, got some sun, spent a nice day in Mexico. Murphy's law, when things are going well, something is bound to get screwed up and it was on our last part of the Mayan tour that we experienced our first miracle. Our tour bus broke down in the middle of no where. We were about 25 minutes from the center of town. The tour guide called in for a replacement bus which will take about 30 - 40 minutes to reach us to pick us up. We were running up against the time to be on board to the ship and we were wondering if we were going to be stuck here and the ship will set sail without us. Then out of no where, another tour bus picked us up since it saw us stranded on the side of the road. If it weren't for that bus, who knows, Matthew may be mashing guacamole dip on the side of the road and selling it in order to sustain us until we got rescued. OK- my imagination gets the better of me. We made it back to port on time and we were on our way to our next stop.

Last stop, Castaway Cay. Disney's private island. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, a bit on the cool side, but I must say, it was quite nice. Read on the beach, got some sun, I was digging this. I can get into the island life. While there, we started to hear about the snowstorm that screwed up the Christmas holiday air travel. Well, all I can say is I timed this trip perfectly. If we left the day after Christmas, we would have been sleeping on the airport floor instead of on the beach. The news of the snowstorm snapped me right back to reality. So much for the "ah" moment. It as great while it lasted.