Like everyone else, we have not been living our normal life for the past year.
Our beloved homeschool group closed down about this time last year and other than a few phones calls, texts and some Facebook chats, we haven’t seen our homeschool friends in almost a year. We miss them.
Same with our family. We haven’t had a family get-together in almost a year and we miss them.
Another thing that has changed for us is travel. For the last several years, we’ve traveled at least once a year, but in many cases 2-3 times during the year. We cancelled all our travel plans this past year and as the year went on, we questioned when we might be able to travel again.
As we approached the 1-year mark of everything changing due to COVID, we are beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. More and more people are getting vaccinated to protect themselves as well as everyone else they may come into contact with. In some areas of the world, they are seeing a reduction in the number of COVID cases. As more people get vaccinated, those numbers will continue to decline and we will begin to see a return of some normalcy.
With things changing for the good, we decided to begin making some plans for travel later this year and next year by booking cruises. Yes, that’s right cruises as in more than one. Three to be exact.
No one knows exactly when ships will be able to sail again, but Royal Caribbean has been successfully sailing from Singapore since December, 2020. Of course they had to make changes regarding mask requirements, COVID testing, hand washing stations, hand sanitizer and even more stringent cleaning protocols. However, all of these changes and their work with the Singapore government has worked.
Here in the U.S., the cruise lines are waiting on the CDC to provide them with guidelines on what steps they need to take so they can begin sailing out of the U.S. Of course the CDC has been promising these guidelines for quite some time, so who knows when they’ll actually release them. Many believe that ships will be able to safely sail again sometime this year and we decided to jump on board (see what I did there). We booked a cruise for December (our Christmas family vacation). Then we decided to book another cruise for February on the same ship.
Then we decided to take Lili on a cruise in April of 2022 for her 15th birthday. She has no desire to have a quincenara and would much rather take a trip, so a cruise it is.
Okay, three cruises over a 5 month period isn’t really normal for us, but travel is a normal part of our family life. Now we’re trying to make up for all the trips we didn’t take this past year.
