When I left off writing prior to my vacation, I had just had my credit card hacked (I had forgotten about that), had a cat bite on my hand, and hurt my foot but had finally gotten cleared by my surgeon for being in water. Ah, simpler times!
Here’s how things were supposed to go:
- Leave early Monday and fly to Chicago
- Fly to Houston
- Fly to Panama
- Land around 7 PM and go to the ship
- Sail at 6 AM on Tuesday morning
Here’s how things went:
- Get up at 3:35 AM.
- Pick up phone
- See text message saying that the crew for our first flight didn’t get enough rest so our flight was delayed
- Do quick math and realize that we won’t make our connections in Chicago.
- Swear
We were cruising with Viking. They make all the flight arrangements. They give you an emergency number to call if you have issues on travel day. For some reason the idea always reminds me of the fixer in Pulp Fiction.
I called immediately. Very long story short – There was no availability of any flight that could get us to Panama on Monday. The soonest we could get to Panama was Tuesday morning at 10 AM. Our ship would have already sailed. The next place for us to catch up with it was in Colon Panama. We couldn’t do the same route we had planned but the next day. No availability. We had to go like this:
- Tuesday 5 PM – fly to Chicago
- Fly to SAN FRANCISCO. That’s a bit out of the way.
- Fly to Panama over night and get there at 10 AM on Wednesday
That added 8 extra hours of flying and we missed basically 2 days of the cruise. Totally missed the Panama Canal. We couldn’t rebook the cruise. It is sold out for years. We booked it 2 years ago ourselves.
(Can I just say though that I was quite entertained by these birds in the San Francisco airport? They would give my green and red bird ideas.)
Anyway, the emergency line said that they would have someone pick us up. While we were on the way to the airport, they called from the ship and asked if we would be getting a taxi. I said that we would not because they said they would have someone pick us up! I was shocked when that actually happened and someone met us at the airport. We were driven to the ship about an hour away. So no canal view except for a glimpse out the plane window but we saw the highway across Panama.
We sort of bumbled onboard exhausted from traveling for about 20 hours. We rushed to grab some food before lunch closed. Here’s my proof of life I sent to my family. Me exhausted somewhere by a port (but not a canal) in Panama.
In the 36 hours we were sitting home instead of traveling, the husband started working the phones at Viking. I swear, they probably have a file on that man. His point was that it wasn’t their fault that the airline made us miss all our flights but they did make the flight arrangements with super close connections that didn’t have any leeway that let this happen. He ended up getting them to comp us both a drink package and $200 in ship board credit. I wasn’t happy. I don’t drink and where were we going to spend money on a cruise ship?
We ended up drinking a lot of Coke Zero between meals to use our drink package and trying to have an alcoholic drink or two a day. Spending the money was the hardest part. There is a spa but $200 doesn’t get you anything much. Most every appointment was already booked anyway. I got an appointment for a head massage thingy on “the last night of the cruise” for $89. Then on the second to last night of the cruise I got a call saying I missed my appointment. Then we had to scramble to try to spend money again because there were no more spa appointments available. The credit was nonrefundable so we couldn’t cash it out and give it as extra tips. All food is included so there is nothing to buy there. There is a little shop on board. That’s the only place to spend money on the whole ship. There was nothing we wanted and everything was way overpriced. We finally told ourselves that this was play money. We had to spend it in the game before the game was over or it would just disappear. We ended up getting:
- 2 stuffed dogs for kids we know
- a wooden elephant figurine
- big bags of candy that we gave to the housekeeping staff
- something else that neither one of us can remember
He’s cute but he isn’t $66 worth of cute! Breathe – play money – breathe.
So, Panama, been there. I’ve seen the airport, the highway, and the port at Colon but nothing else. I’m not really going to say that it was the official start to our cruise. We basically crashed after congratulating ourselves on actually getting there and got ready to head to Costa Rica.
