Finally, A Vacation!

A Well Earned Getaway

After 3 years of barely leaving the house, we finally plucked up the courage to take a 5 day cruise to Mexico. I sort of hinted to that in my last post about one of our stops in Encenada.

We did everything we were supposed to do. Quarantined, got all the covid vaccines, wore masks and did our best to follow all of the constantly changing guidelines. Just like everyone else we dealt with all of the issues that came along with it such as depression, anxiety, boredom and a high baseline level of constant stress. If you didn't experience this, then congratulations! I am jealous.

We hummed and hawed about when would be the right time, but the last thing that really made it happen was a good friend losing his wife to cancer. We asked him if he'd like to go on a cruise with us, and he agreed; so that was it! We planned this trip several months ago and have seriously been looking forward to it.

We were mostly worried about how @little-ricky would deal with the whole thing. We took him to England earlier this year to meet his extended family, and the airplane trip was 10 hours of him screaming bloody murder! Once we got there he had a blast, of course. I was really concerned that he wasn't going to enjoy being on a ship that much.

As it turns out, he really liked being on the ship. Of course, he made me carry him around everywhere because he was a bit overwhelmed with all of the people. But man did that kid love the buffet. I think the staff must have hated us though. He made a horrific mess under the table several times per day!

@afturner and I were talking earlier and did a bit of math. It turns out that it would be cheaper by literally 1000s of dollars per month to live on a cruise ship than our current life here in LA. Can you imagine? Room cleaned several times per day, all the food you can eat - prepared for you. Swimming pools, entertainment, really nice gym and best of all - getting to travel to new places every day.

I have to tell you. It is tempting! Apparently it's also something that a lot of people actually do. Some people retire to cruise ships. The major downslide that I see is that the internet connection is abysmal. We would have to be able to have a good internet connection for work. Who knows, it may be an option at some point in the future! It's fun to think about. Even if we only did it for several months out of the year.

Of course then you'd have to figure out what to do with all of your stuff in the meantime, which would kind of negate the point of saving money.

I was super stoked to see Ricky enjoying himself so much. We bought him a little blow up raft to float around in, but weren't sure if he'd be too scared to get into it. Well, it turned out that we had no reason to worry. It was actually much harder getting him to get out of it when it was time to leave! That kid went 100% energizer bunny all day long.

Of course the up-side to that was that he slept like a log for many, many hours at night giving us a chance to take a breather. To be fair we used most of that time sleeping ourselves - something we've not gotten much of over the past 2 years. I've never slept so much in my life!

I can't tell you how much we needed this trip. I'm not going to lie, it was not as relaxing as our previous child free cruises, but it was still super amazing to get away. One thing that I have learned from this whole experience is that human beings need contact with other humans. We are social creatures by nature!

I certainly won't be waiting another three years to travel again!