Howdy, friends! I just returned from a trip. A trip I was supposed to take in 2020. In March of 2020. March 15, 2020.
You can guess how that went.
The trip in question was a Western Caribbean cruise out of New Orleans, making two stops in Mexico, one in Belize, and one in Honduras. Back in 2020, we’d been watching the situation closely. If you recall (and I know you do, though you may not remember when this happened because time has been weird since the pandemic started), in Feb 2020, the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship, had a major COVID-19 outbreak, which culminated in something like 700 people getting sick and the whole lot being stuck off the coast of Japan for weeks.
And there was another Princess ship around then that had a COVID issue–the Grand Princess, which hung out off the coast of California forever.
(We didn’t go on Princess, I just remember these situations in particular because they were awful.)
In the end, we decided we wouldn’t go, because cruise ships were obviously death traps, and cancelled. And then they cancelled the cruise anyway.
So we rebooked the trip for March 14, 2021. Surely we wouldn’t still be in lockdown and everything a year out.
Ha. Haha.
Anyway, when the 2021 cruise was cancelled, we again, dutifully, rebooked for 2022. Each time we rebooked we got a slightly bigger, nicer room due to incentives because the cruise lines were really hurting.
With the Omicron wave through December and January, it, again, looked like the cruise would be cancelled.
There is something very weird about having a trip planned that continually does not happen. By the time the cruise was not cancelled due to Omicron and it was time to get ready, we were all over it. We’d booked a trip for where we were in 2020. Two years ago. We are no longer in the same place, and it was hard to get excited for something that pre-pandemic me planned.
But hey, we went! And it was lovely. I had an excellent time, even though I sunburned my back something awful and the mosquitos in the rainforest did not care about our insect repellent at all. Masks were required in ports and on public transportation, and any indoor shore excursions, but that’s fine!
And once we were there, all the doubts and the ennui and everything negative sloughed off, and I really do think we got to enjoy everything to the fullest. Maybe, in the end, it was better because we had to wait.
But then I had to come home and do laundry. Boooooo.
Have you had to put something off repeatedly because of the pandemic, friends? Did you find that, as time went on, it felt less and less relevant? Did you finally get to do it, or are you still waiting?