A Long, Winding, and Delayed Path To Celebrate our Silver Anniversary

Our Ship -- the Pride of America

With high confidence, this should be the last blog I open with an explanation of how the Covid 19 pandemic delayed or heavily altered planned travel between 2020 and 2023.  I say that with all sincerity, and every finger crossed.

Hawaii has always been one of those destinations to which K and I agreed that we'd go "someday," but it wasn't necessarily at the top of our list.  We said that consistently for years, with only our preconceived notions to blame.  I made a short visit to Honolulu in 2018 for work and will admit I was a bit taken aback by the beauty and mystery of the place.  Then again, a work trip to a secluded military base is not something on which to base any accurate image of the entire state.

I can honestly admit, too, that I cannot recall the genesis of our decision to book an inter-island Hawaiian cruise to mark our 25th anniversary (31 May 2022).  I do know we booked in late 2020, thinking that we were a) being very organized, and planning almost 18 months into the future, and b) secure in our eventually incorrect notion that Covid 19 would still not "be a thing" in 2022.  We were originally booked to spend our actual anniversary on Norwegian Cruise Lines' Pride of America ship, which sails exclusively between four of the Hawaiian Islands.  In the fall of 2021 we learned that our nephew, Simon, would be graduating high school that same week, down in Tennessee.  As everyone knows, the cruise industry was particular hard-hit during the pandemic, and Hawaii was one of the last places to open back up for tourism, let alone cruises.  When we learned of the schedule conflict, there were no estimates as to when cruises might even open up again, so we rescheduled our cruise for September 2023, thinking that was sufficient cushion, and allowing us to go down to Knoxville for Simon's graduation.  By summer 2022, however, Hawaii was still not open for cruise traffic so we had to reschedule again.  Not confident as to when things might open up, we decided to give ourselves another year cushion and rebooked for late September 2023.  As it turns out, cruises did restart during the fall of 2022, but with a lot of limitations, so we had zero regrets about our decision to push things out even further.

One unexpected outcome, however, was that our family trip to Poland in late August of this year ended only about four weeks before this Hawaii trip was to kick off.  We scheduled Poland around Anna's work and school schedule, and we had no appetite to reschedule Hawaii again, so we left things as they were.  In hindsight, neither of us have any regrets.