Finally starting to exhibit signs of being one of our vacations

It was only a matter of time, after all.

It's been preying on my mind of late that, when the original booking was set up for our upcoming trip, the two 18-year-olds were put in the same cabin with no adults, and assigned a guarantee booking, rather than an assigned cabin. As it turns out when you read the fine print, 18-year-olds require the presence of an adult (defined as someone over 23 or a spouse - theirs, that is - over 21) either in the cabin, in an adjoining cabin, or across the hall from them.

Well, the guarantee cabin pretty much guaranteed that they weren't going to be anywhere near the rest of us, and when their booking stopped saying "TBA" and turned into a cabin number, it proved true. They were on deck 1; most of the rest of us were on deck 6. I began envisioning the scene at embarkation as the powers that be realized that the two girls (and quite frankly, they're about as likely to raise an unsupervised ruckus as a convention of librarians) were not appropriately supervised onboard. And I tried to decide (it's better to figure these things out in advance): if they were denied boarding, would we absolutely need to return home with them? Kidding - it would have spoiled the trip for all of us.

So, I followed my sister's lead, and got on a chat site to ask if this was likely to cause problems. The verdict there? Guilty - and to read their replies, guilty of aggravated murder. Not something calculated to make me feel welcome to ask anything else, I must say. So, writhing with guilt, I got on the phone with the cruise line, and we are trying to work things out to get the girls closer to some responsible adults in our party. Apparently, at this late date, making that happen involves shuffling other people around, which is just all bad.

For what it's worth, my immediate family is not falling on my neck weeping with gratitude for my foresight in getting this straightened out before we found ourselves standing on the pier at Galveston waving good-bye to the rest of the group. Both my husband and daughter are angry that her cabin might change from an ocean view (which is what her guarantee was for) to an inside - she because it "might" make her sick, and he because the girls will then undoubtedly spend more time in our cabin using the balcony.

So, it could be a week fraught with the type of interest that I won't find particularly funny. The countdown isn't quite reminding me of a condemned prisoner's countdown to that final meal, but I won't be putting the old vigor into my spit-yodeling this trip.