Knowing that today was going to be a crazy one at work, I got up at four and was in the office at a quarter until seven in the morning. I was pretty tired all day. Liesl and Luciana had slept in our bed last night and Liesl practically pushed me onto the floor for most of the night making it very hard to sleep.
Originally we had feared that Dominica might have to leave a day early to make it down to Florida for her cruise and that would mean that instead of having today to “train” with her and then two days of the girls by himself, dad would instead of no training at all and three days of the girls to himself – a major difference in stress level. He was pretty worried about that but Dominica decided not to attempt to travel early and so was home today. Her day ended up being a very stressful one, though, because she had to spend the day watching the weather and the flight status and, midway through the day, her flight was cancelled and she had to spend the entire day trying to figure out what she was going to do.
Dominica had a very long day dealing with this. She was really stressed as she bounced from possibly finding a flight to being stuck with no way to get to Jacksonville (where the cruise is leaving from) over and over again. We checked into trains, cars and all kinds of options. She did little else all day.
Everything about this cruise and everything about the coordination necessary to go on it has solidified to me so strongly just how much I never, ever want anything to do with a cruise. Stress, expense, risk and tons of effort to get to the “vacation” all negate any positives that might be available in a cruise situation. Even with weeks of planning and days of closely watching options Dominica is now spending a full day, which is only possible because she stays home with the kids and because dad was there watching them today so that she had the time to do all of this, just trying to figure out how to get to the cruise and spending twice as much on the travel as we had expected. A horrible, horrible experience and, more or less, what you expect because cruises are only really beneficial when taken during local poor weather months (why would anyone want to cruise in the summer) and the tight schedule necessary for a cruise ship to keep makes everything surrounding it very stressful.
After a full day of trying to figure out what to do and being online trying to help others figure out what to do (people from all over the world are unable to make this cruise do to their travel arrangements) Dominica finally figured out that she could get the first flight (the very first flight ever) on JetBlue from JFK to Savannah tomorrow morning and that Katie could drive from Jacksonville up to Savannah and pick her up. So she booked that flight and we made our plans. She is very thankful that she was able to figure something out, but we are still very worried that the flight will be cancelled or that there will be no way to get her to the airport. The chances that any flight will make it through on the east coast is relatively low at this point.
I worked until late, not leaving the office until after seven. It was an extremely long work day for me. So it was well after eight when I got back to the house. Dominica and I decided that the weather was supposed to be okay early in the morning so we would not get her a hotel in Brooklyn for tonight as that would mean more traveling tonight and more logistics for her and more expense when this cruise already took on hundreds of more dollars of cost with the changes in flights. It is a tough gamble either way.
Dad slept in the basement tonight. The girls slept in their own room because Dominica and I really needed sleep and had to get up very early. Our alarm will be going off at three in the morning. Her flight out of JFK is at seven twenty five.
I am prepared and expecting to be working from home tomorrow. The weather is supposed to be just awful. The south was hit with the storm today and we get it in the morning. We are expected around a foot of snow to fall just in the morning. So everyone knows that tomorrow is almost certainly going to be a snow day at the office.