Our Cruise Vacation: Part I

We've made it home from our vacation. There are loads of laundry to be down, the room is still rocking like a boat for me, and we're all exhausted, but no time like the present for starting to get it all down before I forget!

We ended up having a great time, after a very rocky start...or actually, a very ICY start, to be more precise. But, the way everything turned out, we had proof that God was watching over us every step of the way.

The icestorm that was predicted for Kentucky last Saturday showed up right at 7:00am. Coincidentally, that was exactly the time our plane was trying to take off. After being postponed by the control tower while we were on the runway, they unloaded the plane and had us wait back in the terminal. Then, when the temperature raised slightly, they quickly loaded us all back on again...only to have us sit through another 45 minutes or so of waiting and de-icing.

Here's a picture of Elizabeth during one of our attempts to take off from the Lexington airport:



Finally, we were on our way to Cincinnati. Unfortunately, Cincinnati was experiencing snow - not ice - and our connecting flight had already taken off by the time we arrived. They'd already booked us on the next flight, but it was scheduled to get us into Miami without enough time to get to the pier before the boat's scheduled departure. We frantically called the cruiseline in an attempt to see if they would hold the boat for us (we literally needed only ~15 minutes), but they told us there was no way they could do that, and our only option was to meet up with them at the first port - Roatan, Honduras. Needless to say, we were devastated. We had purchased travel insurance for the trip, but that only covered $500 for missed connection expenses, and we knew there was no way we could get all 4 of us to Honduras with that. We were mentally going through other options (staying in Miami, re-booking, etc.) as we wandered around searching for the airline's customer service counter. In desperation, I flagged an airline employee down in the hall to ask where we needed to go. She was very compassionate, and she personally took us back to her computer to try to find another way to get us to Miami on time. She couldn't find one, so she called her supervisor. It turns out her supervisor was a huge cruise fan. When she heard our plight, she authorized her to go ahead and book us through to Honduras - FOR NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. What a blessing! However, it meant instead of checking into the cruise, lounging at the pool, and eating at the buffet like we'd planned, it meant we had to quickly collect our luggage in Miami and check in for another international flight on Saturday afternoon....to a third world country....where almost everyone only spoke Spanish....and without a hotel reservation. Yikes!

Elizabeth was the only one who seemed to still have a smile on her face at that point:



We arrived in San Pedro Sula in Honduras at 8pm local time (9pm our time, after we'd left the house that morning at 5:30am). Once again, we experienced a small miracle when we got a taxi driver that actually spoke fairly good English. It wasn't until after we spent another day in the city and realized how very few people spoke any English at all that we realized what a large blessing this was. After a couple of failed attempts at finding a hotel with any vacancy (I was truly starting to sympathize with Mary and Joseph at this point), he managed to get us a room at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza downtown - which was actually very nice, and definitely the cheapest Crowne Plaza I'd ever stayed in! We experienced our next glimpse of divine intervention when I asked the hotel clerk to suggest a place for us to stay in Roatan. He pointed out a name of a place in a tourist brochure: The Inn of Last Resort. Now, obviously, if just glancing through a list of hotel names, I'm pretty sure that's not the one that I would have chosen. But, I decided to call it. I can't tell you how relieved I was to hear a guy named "Ed" on the other end, with an American accent and a laidback California surfer-boy attitude, tell me that he had a room for us to stay in the next night and he would even pick us up at the airport. At that point, we figured our trip had to be turning around.

Of course, that was before we arrived at the airport the next morning to catch our flight to Roatan. We bungled our way through the ticket counter, airport tax payment, and security check, without meeting another single person that spoke English - other than a very nice, harried lady from Florida who seemed to be having about the same travel luck as we were. We managed to figure out our plane was delayed by over an hour - pretty much through the equivalent of standing around at the gate, holding our ticket out every once in a while, and being gestured "not yet." To be honest, if the other bad-luck-travel lady hadn't been there, we would have been convinced we'd missed another flight. Finally, they loaded us all up on a very old-looking, very small plane....where we waited. Sure enough, once again, we were told to get off the plane because there was a thunderstorm over the area we were supposed to stop in before we got to Roatan. So, we went back to the terminal for more waiting. We definitely had "waiting" down by that point:



Before you really start feeling sorry for us, I have to tell you that our luck finally changed. After we were unloaded, they decided to let us reboard so we could fly to Roatan first. We all got back on the plane, which actually took off that time (after a rather lengthy wait). When we arrived in Roatan, again nobody really spoke English. They also told us there were no taxis (which we later found out was not true). We finally said "Inn of Last Resort" enough times that someone loaded our luggage on a cart, took it outside, and called the hotel. They got Ed on the phone, and he personally came to pick us up. What a welcome sight and sound he was to us! Seeing him was actually the turning point in our trip. Before that time, Jonathan, David, and I had all been very discouraged by the unexpected delays. But, David and I had also been very encouraged by the way God was so obviously leading us exactly where we needed to go. We also talked about it and decided that we would try to let God use every unexpected opportunity we had to bless somebody else - whether it be a friendly word, a much needed extra tip around Christmastime, or the opportunity to show our son how life's unanticipated twists and turns can still be handled with God's grace. Don't get me wrong - we all still had our moments of frustration. In fact, we later realized that Elizabeth was truly the one who took it all in stride. Sure, she was too young to realize that we really weren't expecting to be where we were, but she was really a trooper through the whole process.

So, the next post (or posts) will fill you in on all the fun we actually had during the rest of the week!