Our 14 Night Panama Canal Cruise Starts Tomorrow!

Today is the day that I have been waiting for for over a year since we booked this cruise the day it was released.  We actually set sail tomorrow, but today we fly to Orlando to begin our vacation.  It has been a dream of mine for years to sail this itinerary, but up until now my husband was not okay being gone from his job for 2 weeks straight.  He has the type of job where taking any amount of time off means hundreds of emails and lots of issues to deal with when he returns.  A lot piles up while he is gone, so coming back after a vacation is always a challenge, and the longer he is gone, the more catch-up work there will be.  I completely understood, so I put this dream on hold and hoped that it would eventually happen someday.  Then, about a year and a half ago, I got breast cancer at age 38 and our perspectives completely changed.  Thankfully I am now cancer free, but we now look at things a lot differently.  You never know how much time you have left in this life.  It was so easy for us to say “someday”, but then in an instant the rug was pulled from under us and it became a very real possibility that we might not have “someday”.

You can imagine my shock and joy when my husband told me to book this cruise a little over a year ago.  I was in the middle of a very difficult time.  It was just a few months since my double mastectomy (the recovery from which was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life!) and I was still in the process of reconstruction with tissue expanders, which were extremely painful.  To top it off, my diagnosis happened just as we were getting ready to move across the country so that my husband could start a new job.  He had already resigned from his old job and set a starting date for the new one, so he had to go in order for us to not have an interruption in our health insurance.  I chose for the girls and I to stay put for 9 months where we had the help and support of friends and family while I was undergoing treatment.  We were able to see each other pretty much every other weekend, but it was still hard to not have him by my side.  It was a very physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting 9 months, and the opportunity to book this cruise was a huge deal to me.  It was something to look forward to, something to distract me from my current situation, something to dream about when I was having a hard day (which was a lot!).

Now that you know the background, you can see how this trip is different from our previous cruises.  This time, I am feeling more emotion than I ever have before a vacation – a mixture of disbelief and gratitude, plus other emotions I can’t even describe.  Hopefully everything will go off without a hitch and this will be the cruise of a lifetime!

If you haven’t already, please like my page on Facebook (click here) and follow along with me on this journey.  I am going to try my hardest to post pictures and/or updates once a day, and hopefully more.  I won’t be posting to the blog while I’m gone, but I will start my trip report ASAP once I return.  I can’t wait to share all of the details with you all!

Bon Voyage!