What I Did On My Summer Vacation
When last we left our intrepid adventurer, he was in a hotel room in Frederick, MD, having survived a perilous journey across multiple states. Ok, it wasn’t all that perilous, but it did involve a migraine as he entered the state of NJ. This becomes important later, as it was a sign of bigger medical problems to come in New Brunswick, Canada. I’ve got to stay out of these “New” places. They don’t seem to be good for me.
The three days in MD were spent quietly. Let’s see if I can come up with everything I did. I slept. I went through my entire iPod coming up with a playlist for Zephyr. I slept. I created a character creation spreadsheet to help my GM fine tune her system. I slept. I worked on a couple of pieces of music. I slept. I answered a very small number of work emails. I slept. Yeah, that about sums it up, very restful.
Friday Monique and I headed over to Baltimore to meet up with her family for the cruise. We got to the ship by noon and were aboard and settled in by 2:00. We played cards out on the pool deck until muster time.
If you’ve never done this exciting drill, it involves putting on these dorky orange life vests and joining all the other passengers in a display of public orange dorkiness after they herd you like cows to your assigned stations to listen to the captain drone on about a topic you learned about if you bothered to read the material about it. Can you tell I’m excited about this part of the trip? Oh, and deviantangel, you’ll be happy to know that after that conversation about orange that very day, you already have your revenge.
To add some fun to this activity, the herder sent me toward our assigned station and Monique in the opposite direction. Monique didn’t say anything, so I assumed she was still behind me. Fortunately she ended up with her mother and father, so I didn’t get too much grief over being unaware about what was going on behind me. *sigh*
We were in the first seating in the dining hall so we got seated at 5:30 every night and is spite of that, we were still too long at dinner for the second seating of the after dinner show. Dinner with eleven people is obviously a production. Monique and I were both pretty tired so we went to bed early.
Saturday saw us at sea all day on the way to Canada. We slept in late (a theme of the vacation), played cards with the family, took part in a trivia game, saw whales and took in a show in the ship’s theater (and ate too much again, but you can just assume that every day).
Sunday was more cards and I spent a fair amount of time working on various music projects I have going. We also caught a comedian show in the theater and spent a bit of time losing money in the ship’s casino.
Monday morning found us docked in St. John in New Brunswick, Canada. Monique and I were supposed to meet her family at 8:30 for breakfast and maybe go ashore for a couple hours. We never figured I’d have a mini-stroke and be taken to the hospital. The short story is that I suddenly lost all power to speak. There were no other symptoms. The ship’s doctor ran me through the standard battery of neurological tests and decided I needed tests only a hospital could give me.
I spent hours in the emergency room and had a CT scan that showed completely normal. They admitted me so they could get an MRI done. I stayed overnight and when we found out it could be days before an MRI could be done, I checked out.
I’ll give a much better update of the medical situation in a separate post.
Monique had spent a fair amount of time on Monday night trying to find a rental car in St. John so we could drive on Tuesday to Halifax, 4 ½ hours away, to catch up with the ship. There were no cars to be had in St. John. We figured we’d take a taxi to the airport and either catch a plane to Halifax or get a rental car there. Not only were there no flights from St. John to Halifx, there were no rental cars available at the four rental car places. We figured maybe we could get a bus to Bar Harbor, ME for the next day (the ship’s next stop), but there were no buses going there either.
We ended up taking a taxi from St. John to Halifax for $450. It turned out to be one the most enjoyable parts of the trip. Our driver was friendly and funny and informative and best of all, he got us there with 15 minutes to spare to departure time so we really only lost a day and a half of our vacation, though we lost all of our time in St. John and Halifax.
Just as a note, the people of St. John were fantastic, from the four cab drivers we had, to the nurses, doctors, airline clerks, the lady at the car rental place who tried everything to find us a car and the port authority personnel. Everyone was so friendly and helpful, uh, except customs, who as we found out later was the driving force behind us almost not being allowed back on the ship.
The rest of the cruise was mostly uneventful, except for having to have our passes reissued every time we got off or on because no one could figure out how to reinstate us as passengers. Apparently, once you get discharged medically from a cruise, you don’t come back on. A word to any cruisers out there, if you get sick to the point of needing a hospital and you want to finish your cruise, shut up and take it. If you get off, you don’t get back on.
The only reason we were able to get back on is because we told them the doctor certified me fit to travel, which was a slight bending of the truth, but since I had to travel one way or another to get home, the cruise ship, which was already paid for, was my best bet. That, and our car was in Baltimore MD, so we had to get to Baltimore to drive it home.
We had another restful day docked off of Bar Harbor ME. Monique and I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to take a tender to go ashore and we were both tired from the escapades of the previous couple of days. That and the fog was so thick you couldn’t see 50 feet, so we figured we wouldn’t see anything worthwhile anyway.
Boston was a fun stop. The alarms went off when we tried to get off. It was flashing security not to let us get on, even though we were getting off. We had to go get another set of new passes and special escort to get past security. It was the first really nice day of the cruise though and we were going with her family to meet up with a bunch of other family that live in the area. As expected, the alarms went off when we tried to get back on, but we were getting to be pros at directing security on who to talk to, so it was a brief stop.
We spent the entire next day at sea again relaxing. Monique and I spent a lot of time in our cabin. She read a lot and I worked some more on musical projects. I played my flute more in the past week than in the six months prior. It was nice.
We got to Baltimore yesterday 3 hours late because the ship had engine troubles overnight, but getting off the ship went very smoothly and we were on the road by 10:30 in the morning and home by 4:30. Thus ended my summer vacation. It was too short and had far too much trouble to be as relaxing as it needed to be, but it beat working.