Celebrity Cruise Day 1

The Embassy Suites free breakfast is a madhouse, a traditional that has carried on for at least 23 years when I stayed in the one in Indianapolis for a month.

When I picked up our vouchers for our bus transfer to the cruise terminal, the worker said to budget at least 15 or 20 minutes to make it downstairs. She wasn’t kidding. After leaving our room with our bags, we first tried waiting 20 minutes for an elevator down to the lobby, then eventually formed a strategy of “go up to go down”, merely to get space with our bags in an elevator. The lobby was jam-packed with people waiting for cruise transfers.

The chaos of the experience at this hotel will make me reconsider future travel plans where we’re heading to a ship. We’ve mostly pivoted away from Airbnb’s but this might be a situation I’d think about it.

Once in our transfer bus the entrances to Port Everglades were overwhelmed by traffic, taking us 25 minutes to go the 4 miles from hotel to ship. The ship left more than an hour and a half late.

Ever since the first snafus yesterday, and through today’s headaches, I had this feeling of dread that was hard to shake. Then, it manifested: son managed to roll his ankle jumping down some stairs. He made it back to the room and it started swelling up immediately. We engaged the Medical Center here onboard the ship, who took some X-rays and concluded nothing seems to be broken, but he definitely can’t put weight on it, and was advised not to try for at least several days.¹

He was wheeled back to the room and now has loaner crutches for the duration of the voyage. Keep in mind this happened in the first hour of an 11 night cruise.

I’m disappointed for so many reasons. I book these vacations for us as a family because I can feel the time with our kids as kids racing by, so I want to maximize the experiences we share together. I’m crushed for him because he so values his mobility on these trips: being able to ‘elevator race’, play shipwide hide and seek, and just generally have a level of independence that he doesn’t get much at home. Racing around the ship is completely off the table now. How mobile he’ll be a few days from now we’ll have to see. We will cancel at least three shore excursions already purchased for all four of us. I’ll see what other ones we might do instead where he can be accomodated. And I’m disappointed for my daughter, who now won’t have her vacation buddy to help give her the confidence to meet other kids.

Having written all that, I now realize in my anger, both immediately following the accident and then thinking through all the implications, I haven’t done a great job of supporting the emotional pain he’s going through. It’s like a can of gas was tossed on what was already a lot of complex emotions I’ve been feeling even before the trip.

Still: we’re here, we’re alive, it’s winter, and we’re heading to the warm Caribbean.

Footnotes