Our Travel Adventures

As I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, Adam and I seem to attract crazy things happening to us on all of our vacations and trips. From Forest Fires, to Flash Floods, to Accidents, to week long vomit sessions. Its just something we have come to expect when we plan a vacation and this trip was no exception. And although we had an absolutely WONDERFUL time on our cruise. It didn’t come without its share of little adventures and I wanted to capture it here on the blog since we print these each year for our Family Journal.

We flew into Fort Lauderdale on a Saturday night and everything went really smoothly. No delays, no bad weather, and even our transfer to our hotel came without incident. However, after arriving at our hotel and ordering some Chinese take-out we got on our laptops to see if we could figure out a way to go to church the next day. Adam found a ward online on the Church’s website that started at 8:30 am so we called a few Taxi places and were quoted astronomical numbers to take us 5 miles to the church, so Adam checked out the bus schedules and was able to find something that could work. However the downfall was that we would need to get up at 7:00 Miami time (5:00 OUR TIME) to make the bus and get to the church by 8:30. We called the lobby to our hotel worked out an arrangement with the front office so that we could check out of our room at noon (instead of 11:00) and went to sleep.

At 5:00 am we got up, showered, and rushed to get out the door. Adam was ready before I was (big surprise seeing that he doesn’t wear makeup or have to do his hair) so he went down to the lobby to pick us up some breakfast while I finished up. I met him down in the lobby, where I grabbed a bagel and juice and we took off practically running to walk the 4 blocks needed to get to the bus stop on time. Mind you I am in high heels this whole time (Dumb I know, but I really didn’t think we would be walking very far). So we get to the bus stop and within 2 minutes of waiting the bus comes. We pay our $1.50 each to get on and sit down and relax among the other 10 or so passengers on the bus when we realize we aren’t in Kansas anymore Toto, because we are the ONLY white people on the bus. Its not bothersome to us of course, but was just more of a shock coming from Utah where white people are quite dominant.

So we make it to our bus stop and get off the bus. “Okay, where to now?” I ask. Adam informs me we have another 8 blocks to walk to the church. “Whoa what?” But I try to suck it up and be cheerful and not think about my already hurting feet in my high heels. I mean really, in a matter of hours I would be getting on a cruise ship, did I really have anything to complain about? So I happily walked with Adam the 8 blocks to church. However, just as we were about halfway through the 7th block we ran straight into a fence with all sorts of “No Trespassing” signs telling us the bridge we needed to take to get us to the church on the other side was under construction. Ahhhh! It was at this point that we began to laugh. Really? Here comes our luck!

So we follow the detour signs which take us back 4 of the blocks we had just walked, (to the East) then down another block, over another bridge and then a few more blocks in the wrong direction of where the church was. Then to get back to the church we had to walk 5 more blocks South, over two more bridges and then 6 more blocks West and over a 4th bridge. It was about this time that we started singing, “The Pioneer children sang as they walked, and walked, and walked” as well as “Come Come ye Saints,” to help us remember that others had walked further and longer to seek their religious refuge! 🙂

We figured it out and we think total it ended up being about 29-30 blocks of walking! CRAZY. About half way there I decided to go without my heels seeing as I was getting blisters on the tops of my feet, and therefore went barefoot for the last 15 blocks or so giving me blisters on the bottoms of my feet too!

But thats not where the fun ends folks. As we limp into the Church parking lot, something dawns on us. There is not a SINGLE car in the parking lot! No Not ONE, and all the doors on the front of the building are locked.

I’m literally about in tears by now, but try to keep my emotions in check as we round the back of the building. Luckily we see a few cars out back and find a single door unlocked and we go inside. Inside we find voices coming from a Bishops office and we quietly knock on the door. The ward clerk comes out and greets us, and we ask him about the 8:30 ward that should have been starting 20 minutes earlier. He laughs and says, “Oh they still haven’t changed that on the website? Yeah, they moved BUILDINGS and TIMES back in January! We should call them and have them fix it because we have people show up early almost every week from out of town!”

I wish I could say I also laughed at this, but I was so tired, and so grumpy from walking 30 blocks that I seriously just wanted to cry. “Could you call a taxi for us?” I asked with tears in my eyes. The clerk was so kind and insisted instead of finding a member to give us a ride back to our hotel seeing as we couldn’t stay for the 11:00 ward since we HAD to be checked out of our hotel at Noon. So we waited about 20 minutes for the Bishopric meeting to be over, chatted with some of the missionaries, and then the Clerk found a ward member willing to give us a lift back. We ended up being taken home by the 1st counselor in the Elders Quorum who was living in Florida while he went to Dental school. He was just a sweetheart and so nice to take us back.

When we got back to our hotel (around 9:30 am Miami time, or 7:30 Utah time) we were so tired we went straight to sleep and napped until 11:30 before getting up to finish packing and check out of our hotel. Then we went down to the lobby at about 10 till 12:00 in order to catch our Shuttle to the airport, to catch our Van down to the Miami port, to catch our Carnival cruise. However, our shuttle ended up being almost an hour late, which made us miss several vans down to Miami from the airport, which made us have to call up our transport company and reschedule everything and be on the phone constantly, but eventually we made it to airport and then down to the port. Whew! What a morning though!

I wish I could say that our crazy adventures ended there, but true to our vacation nature, it continued. Later that night after we spent a terrific evening together on the ship we headed back to our stateroom to go to bed early being exhausted from our adventures from the day. It was around 10:00 or so and as we entered our room we realized that our room was a Disco! Music was blaring so loud you couldn’t even hear the T.V. and the base was shaking the walls of our room.

We thought about calling to complain about the loud noise, but we kept thinking, “We are on a cruise, how can we possibly complain?” So we didn’t say anything. Plus we thought that the noise was coming from a 10:00 show and would probably be over by 11:30 at the latest. So we put in our ear plugs and did the best we could to sleep. Although we both dosed off, we didn’t fall into a fitful rest until just after 2:00 am when the music finally stopped.

The 2nd night it happened again, but we again thought that it would eventually end, but just like the first night it didn’t stop again until 2:00 am. By the 3rd night we both were starting to feel pretty grumpy with our lack of sleep and found out from our table mates that they had heard the ship was down 300 passengers and therefore we might be able to get another room in a quieter place. It was also that night that we did a little research and realized that it wasn’t the Theater that was making all the noise but that there really was a Disco RIGHT BELOW us in the Casino (which we hadn’t visited since we don’t gamble).

So although we hated to complain, we decided to do it in an effort to see if we could get into a quieter room. So we went to the front desk and asked to switch rooms. When they asked us why, we explained about the Disco, but they acted like they had no idea what we were talking about. And then proceeded to tell us that they had no rooms at all available. This bothered me on several levels.

1) According to all of the employees on the ship that we had talked to, employees remain on the ship for 8-10 months at a time, AND most of them have been with the ship for YEARS (Some of them up to 10-16 years). Therefore, I was pretty sure that the music being loud was not a new concern, and I was even more sure that I wasn’t the first person to complain about it in all the years since the ship had made its first voyage.

2) It didn’t sit well with me that I had just been lied to. Really? Not a single room on this entire ship is open when there are 300 less passengers? And I won’t even mention that the very next day as we were sitting down to breakfast that we overheard a couple that had been upgraded to a better room because they were VIP passengers. So what happened to their OLD room I wonder? Had IT magically been occupied?

Anyway, we were just the tiniest bit bugged. And night after night, Carnival promised to try to find us another room, but just were never able to have anything open up. So all 7 nights of our cruise we spent rocking out to disco music until 2:00 am as we tried to sleep. It was so loud some nights that Adam and I would turn down our T.V. and sing along with the songs because we could hear EVERY SINGLE WORD of them! And although it was something we could laugh at, we were walking zombies by the end of our trip and often had to sleep for several hours in the afternoons being exhausted from our lack of evening sleep.

The good news though is that they refunded a portion of our cruise ($123.00) and also gave us a 15% discount if we ever book with them again. Not sure if we will book with them again, but we will see.

So that too was another adventure in itself. All in all though the trip was wonderful and we truly felt so blessed to be able to have that time away. Craziness and all! 🙂