Well we actually made it, and I'm typing this from the 2022 80's Cruise from onboard Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Seas. But let me tell you, it wasn't an easy road to get here.
I'll start by saying that my background in psychology and my knowledge of human nature leads me to say that we all have areas of our lives where we're a little crazy. Some have many, some have fewer. But when you feel yourself easily angered about something, and pushing things just a little too hard, then someone has touched on one of yours. Speaking personally, I have a lot of them. I mean a lot. My wife Denise, not so many. But one of them is her devotion to 80's music in general, and the '80's Cruise in particular. She went for the first time two years ago, and she thought she'd gone to heaven. And for her, in a way, the entire two years of the COVID pandemic has been about her struggle to get back to the next one.
I've told you a little over the course of the pandemic how I've vacillated about being excited about going on the cruise and being anxious about it. I mean, it's a frigging pandemic! And there were a lot of things that concerned me about it, especially that I knew this: While most cruise ships today have been going out at much, much less than full capacity, some of them practically ghost ships, because this was a cruise that was chartered by an outside company (ECP), and because the cruise was just about sold out in advance almost two years ago, this ship was going to be damned near 100% full. (And while I haven't double-checked it with ship personnel, from what I see this week, I was mostly correct about that.) Social distancing? What's that? 6 feet apart in the elevators? Don't make me laugh.
So when the omicron variant suddenly took off near the end of last year, my anxiety went through the roof. When ECP offered full refunds to everyone in November if they cancelled their cruise by the end of that week, I gently implied to Denise that perhaps we should take advantage of that offer while we could. She didn't respond - I'm not even sure if she processed what I said - but the next day, she went and booked our hotel rooms in Florida. Which I guess was her way of telling me she was going, whether I was or not. OK, fine.
So we've chugged along, getting ready for our cruise, I with equal parts excitement and dread. (Well, dread is probably too strong a word. But discomfort, anyway.)
A little more than a week ago, I came down with a minor medical ailment that made me doubt whether it would be a good idea if I went. I pulled my son aside, as he's the one who had accompanied my wife to the last 80's Cruise, and asked him if he'd be able to step in for me at the last minute if I wasn't able to go. (I didn't want Denise trying to make the trip to Florida, etc., without some help, if at all possible.) My son told me he'd go if he "had to," because he didn't want Denise traveling alone either. However, he also let me know that he'd rather not if I didn't need him to, because he had "big plans" for the week we were going to be away. When your 21-year-old who still lives with you makes a comment like that - well, lets just say I was suitably terrified. Luckily for him, my ailment cleared up, so I told him never mind.
The next thing that happened occurred the weekend before we were set to sail. That Saturday, my daughter's boyfriend (who lives with us) came home ill. By the next day, he was hacking and coughing and feeling miserable. At this point, Denise, who is usually the most compassionate of people, let me know secretly that she planned to kill him if he spread COVID through the house and caused us to miss the cruise. I reminded her that it wasn't his fault if he got sick. She agreed. Nevertheless, I sensed that his life might be hanging by a thread.
That Monday, while I was still half asleep, I heard my son walking him through a home COVID test. I also heard him sneezing a coughing up a storm, all throughout the house, and I knew there was no way the rest of us weren't going to catch it. I learned later on that thankfully, he had tested negative on the home test. Unfortunately, by the end of the night, I could feel my throat getting sore, And sure enough, by the next day, everyone else in the house was feeling terrible.
(A day or so later, he confided that he was pretty sure he'd gotten sick due to taking a February "cold water plunge." At that point, I withdrew my services as his defense lawyer. If he made Denise miss this cruise, there was no saving him.)
Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I felt godawful - sneezing, coughing, etc. I took care of my health as best I could, and by Thursday, I was much better. (Which was a good thing, as we were scheduled to fly out on Friday.)
However, the next hurdle was our pre-COVID testing. Although the cruise COVID protocols have changed almost every other week over the last few months, for right now, the cruise lines are all requiring you to pass a COVID test within two days of your sail date. Our sail date was Saturday.
We had purchased COVID tests from the cruise line, which are special tests that you have to take while proctored by medical personnel over Zoom. (A regular home test isn't acceptable - it has to be supervised by a medical person.) Because we're both vaccinated, we only had to take the rapid test, but it's non-negotiable - if you show up at your cruise port without proof that you've passed a medically supervised COVID test, they won't let you on the ship - end of story.
We called into the test line, and Denise went first. The person supervising was obviously not in America, and as I listened to his heavy accent giving instructions, I stressed - I wasn't sure I'd be able to follow them when it was my turn. Denise was also getting flustered, until at one point, he told her to remove a tab. When she did, her test strip fell apart. He had meant a different tab. Unfortunately, this made the test unusable, and Denise had only bought two tests - one for each of us. He informed us it was no problem, because he would report that the test was no good, and they'd issue us a refund. He didn't seem to understand (or to care) that the refund wasn't what made a difference - we had to both submit negative COVID tests, or it was no cruise for us.
Luckily (and this is something that wouldn't have happened a few months ago), there was a CitiMD near us that indicated that we could come in that day, and we'd receive our results the same day. (I did offer to let Denise use the second test kit and go without me, but I really didn't want to see her have to go on her own.)
In any event, we shot over to the medical office, and after a moment of panic because it looked closed, we were able to enter the office and get tested. Because my daughter's boyfriend, who now referred to himself as "Patient Zero," had tested negative on the home COVID test, I was pretty sure that we both would too. And happily, I was correct.
I was still a little nervous, and that night, I emailed my travel agent and asked her if there was any chance cold symptoms might still keep us off the cruise. She emailed me back that there was, because they still ask you health questions before the cruise. I considered withholding this info from Denise, but decided that if this was going to happen. it would be better if she was prepared for it. In retrospect, that was an error. "We don't tell them!" she practically shouted.
I wasn't comfortable with this. I'm a lousy liar anyway, and I had heard of a case a few months earlier where someone had gone on a ship and had withheld telling the cruise line he had symptoms. Then, once he was on the ship, his symptoms worsened, and they had to remove him early. (They might have even had to turn the ship around to do so.) They had removed him from the ship, and I'd heard there was a chance he was going to be banned from cruising ever again. I repeated this information to Denise, but she wasn't impressed. "I don't care! I'm going!" she insisted. "And if you tell them and they say you can't go, Bye!"
At this time, I think I told her that for next year's cruise in California (which she has already booked us on), I wasn't going. "I can't deal with this!" I told her.
She calmed down a little, as did I. But I didn't know how this was going to play out.
We both got a good night's sleep and left the house early the next morning to catch our flight. It was all good now, right? Not so much.
We were flying out of Kennedy Airport (which I hated, but apparently there are no direct flights to Orlando these days out of MacArthur). Instead of parking in the long-term airport parking lot, Denise had prepaid for parking nearby at a much lower rate, as she had two years ago when she went with my son. Unfortunately, the lot she'd parked in last time had been booked up, so they'd referred her to another lot. We entered the company's alleged address into her GPS and headed off. You know where this is going, don't you?
We were supposed to arrive at 11AM at the lot, leave her car, and take their shuttle to the airport next door for our 1PM flight. But you know, sometimes GPS's lie.
We drove around for 30 minutes trying to find this stupid lot. People gave us different directions, none of them correct. Finally, at the last possible minute, Denise was able to find the number to call our lot, and they told us how to get there.
We got to the airport, checked in (there were a few issues with this as well), and got ushered to the gate approximately two seconds before boarding began.
We had another slight issue on the flight - we always buy an extra seat, because we're hefty. But the agent we'd checked in with had forgotten to give us a boarding pass for the extra seat. And shortly before our takeoff, a woman showed up with a boarding pass for our extra seat.
Luckily, Denise had the paperwork to prove we had paid for the extra seat, and the flight attendants had been able to find an extra seat elsewhere for this woman.
The flight was otherwise uneventful, except that I often have problems with my ears while flying - they don't handle the depressurization of the cabins all that well, and especially because I still had a cold, the landing was kind of painful. Other than that, though, the flight went well. We landed and caught our shuttle to the hotel we were staying in Friday night.
We had a quiet dinner at the hotel, went to bed and got a good night's sleep. It was all smooth sailing from here. (Right.)
In the morning, the cruise bus we'd arranged picked us up a little early at our hotel. We got to the cruise port with no issues, and went to customer service. We had arranged wheelchairs for the embarkation process, as neither of us can stand and walk for as long as check-in usually takes. At one point, Denise started to ask the wheelchair handlers about the health questionnaire (as we hadn't found it online where we had expected). But they didn't really understand what she was asking, and I poo-pooed it and got her to stop asking. Don't ask, don't tell, I figured.
We were whizzed through security, and over to the next step in the check-in process. At this point, a lady in front of the counter started to ask us a few questions. She checked our negative COVID tests, and we were just flying through this process. She had a few last questions for us: "Have you had any flu symptoms this week - any fever, chills, body aches, loss of taste, coughing, congestion?" she asked, seeming to barely listen to our answers.
"I had a little congestion early in the week, but nothing serious," I heard myself say.
The whole terminal seemed to go go silent, as the woman's expression got serious. "Did you say you had congestion?" she asked.
No! What? I never said that.
I sheepishly said, "Yes, but it's mostly gone now."
I looked across and saw Denise shooting daggers at me with her eyes over her COVID mask.
"Come to the counter," the woman told us.
"Oh, you probably shouldn't have said that," my wheelchair pusher whispered. At this point, I knew I had stepped in it.
Over at the counter, they asked us a million more questions about our health issues - when did they start, etc. (By this point, Denise had fessed up to having congestion also, glaring at me the whole time.)
"What happens now?" my wheelchair handler asked.
"You have to take them downstairs to be retested," the woman behind the counter replied.
At this point, my skin was actually starting to burn from the looks Denise was giving me.
As our wheelchair handlers pushed us along to elevator, my guy said that I probably shouldn't have said anything. "She should have let it go, though," he said, referring to the lady with the clipboard. "She's pretty new. Someone else probably would have let it pass."
Please kill me.
We were taken in an elevator down to the basement level, which was basically empty, except for some medical personnel. They explained that they had to do the PCR test on each of us, and we would have to wait 45 minutes for the results.
They tested me first, 10 times around each nostril. Then they wheeled me into a large, empty room with a bunch of chairs and one woman working the desk. Denise followed a few moments later. She wasn't happy.
We'd been told that they'd send the results of our tests to Denise's phone.
A moment later, the woman came over and told us they'd given us the wrong test, and they were going to take us back in to do the antigen test. I pointed out that the one they gave was more thorough, and asked couldn't they just process that one. She said the wait would be longer - 45 minutes vs. 30 minutes. I asked Denise what she wanted to do, and she agreed that we might as well just have them use the tests we'd already taken.
We sat there waiting in the large room, just the two of us. Out of the high windows of the room, we could see the top of our ship. We were tantalizingly close.
I tried to explain to Denise that I hadn't wanted it to be like the end of the original The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3.
The woman with the clipboard: Have you had any symptoms?
Me: No!
The woman with the clipboard: Ok, you can just go thr...
Me: Achoo!
And suddenly I'm looking into the deadpan face of Walter Matthau.
Denise was having none of it.
It was a harrowing 45-50 minutes sitting there in that empty room and waiting. I didn't expect the tests to be anything but negative, but you never knew for sure. And I couldn't imagine what it be like if Denise got this close to her ship, only to get turned away at the last moment because of me. Or rather, I could imagine it. And it wasn't pretty.
As we waited, I nervously texted my daughter and told her what I had done. She texted me back a one-word response: "Oof!"
After it had been more than 45 minutes with no results on Denise's phone, the worker in the room left for a moment. When she came back, blessedly, she had the results of both of our COVID tests. They were negative! Thank God!
From there, things only took a few minutes more. Our wheelchair handlers came back and got us through the rest of the check-in. They handed us off to the handlers who actually pushed us over the gangplank and onto the ship.
We had made it! Our 80s Cruise adventure had finally officially begun.
SO that's where I'll leave it for tonight. My life had passed before my eyes, but thankfully, my big mouth hadn't ruined everything.
Later in the week, I'll tell you all about how the cruise is going. Until then, be good to one another!
