We're mostly packed, although if the suitcases go off tomorrow with no addition to their contents, I'm going to be swishing undies in the sink a lot next week - and I didn't buy any of that kind of detergent. So we have a few last things to add before we can officially declare victory.
My husband, daughter, and parents are starting to drive down tomorrow morning. Maybe with my daughter's friend, maybe without her. Not that she's not going or anything, it's just that she was in England all of the past week and some, and she's apparently really jet-lagged. So her family is looking into flying her out with us on Saturday instead. I can sympathize. It's been over 20 years since I spent a short vacation in England, and I even made it easier by living on the East Coast at the time, and I can still remember how disorienting it was for a couple of days after I got back.
We're working through the final details - getting the animals into their boarding houses, figuring out how many cars are going to the airport, coming up with a way to distribute the wine bottle totes amongst the adults who can bring them onboard. Even working out the logistics of getting things like swimsuits into the carryon bags so we can spend the hours waiting for our checked bags in the pool.
I've tracked down the webcams for Galveston island, and have been checking out their weather (it looks quite nice down there right now), and even found a bunch of pictures taken on our ship, so I have an idea of what to expect. It'll be different - they take a very different approach to design than RCI or Princess, I'd say. Much more Vegas-esque. Although I don't think the resemblance extends to having people hawking the services of "sex workers" by handing out their baseball cards. At least, I hope not - that would make for a far too interesting trip.
You know, all our cruises to date have been just my immediate family, and our one extended-family trip, while entertaining, ended with all of us needing not to see the other families for a couple of weeks - we weren't fighting, but we'd had enough togetherness by then. So I am kind of wondering how that aspect of the upcoming trip will work out. Three of our cabins are adjoining one another; the other two are about as far from those three and each other as they could get without being on another ship. The logical conclusion is that the three adjoining cabins will become party central. The preferred conclusion would be that cabins are private space - a place to get away from everyone without fear of intrusion. And are we going to end up going everywhere in a mob? I herd cats for a living, after all, and graduation (party) weekend, where we assumed responsibility for getting all of our out-of-town relatives from event to event, just about did me in. I think we need some rules. Maybe these:
- No compulsion to breakfast or lunch with other members of the party - they're both just too hard, and we can't possibly all be on the same schedule. Some of us are teenage boys, after all.
- For dining in the dining room, we meet at the table. No waiting around and going in as a group. It's not like the waiters aren't used to that anyway.
- It is perfectly acceptable to want to do something without including other families - and to act on that desire. A family obviously engaged in something "on their own" becomes automatically invisible to everyone else.
- We should define a mechanism to advertise our whereabouts when we're doing something and would welcome others to join in if they want. Maybe that's what the post-it notes are for. We could use them like the wipe-off-boards on college dorm room doors.
- Also, for any activities that involve "meet at landmark and X" type plans, we should establish the ice-cream rule: If you're not there by the time it would take ice cream to melt, anyone waiting to meet is free to head off to the planned activity.
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