10th Anniversary Cruise
It hasn’t been a fast 10 years, but it still surprised me a bit. That is just how time works. When we were about 6 years in, our friends celebrated their 10th Anniversary BIG. Caid said he wanted us to as well. I immediately started crunching numbers in my head-I wasn’t sure if it would work. Many things have changed-and it did work. It worked money wise, it worked family wise, it worked time wise, and we are so, so grateful. The girls stayed with my parents, we were able to get the time off of work. Money wise, it ended up more than the $2000 I had planned, but we were blessed by financial gifts that made it work.
I’d been on one cruise, but Caid never had. Once I realized we could go to Jamaica, that seemed perfect. We really only hit two issues the whole time: the excursion in Jamaica, and the return flight home (the plane had issues and we had to be rerouted and arrived 3.5 hours later than planned). And about the excursion, the 6 hours we were in port, 3 were spent on the bus. The 3 that were spent doing things was pretty great.
The problem is that once you’ve traveled internationally, it is kind of hard to be relegated to excursions- or at least this one. I wanted to be free, and we were stuck waiting 45 minutes for everyone to show up for the bus to leave. They decided to take us to a beach club in the middle of nowhere-an extra 45 minutes each way. We arrived for lunch at 3pm and then were only given one option to buy food that was very expensive, and not very good (Caid said our local Indianapolis Jamaican food was much better). There was no time to shop, but I grabbed three souvenirs as they ushered us back up to the ship.
We did go to Dunn’s river falls, which was fantastic. The people were kind, and the water was lovely. Honestly, I did bring enough expectations for those 6 hours that it would have been hard to live up to it. But the next day we did our own thing (taking the public bus) at Grand Cayman, and that was really perfect. The food on the cruise was great, we loved our little cozy room, the shows were fun, and we watched lots of movies on the deck with the big jumbotron. Caid loved Karaoke, and I loved the sunrises. We made sure to take the stairs everywhere so we could work up an appetite for the food.
It was restful, enjoyable, and fun. It is really so wonderful to have a partner to have fun with. It felt like we were making up for all the missed dates from years past. On the way to the cruise (YouTube videos told me to never arrive on the same day as a cruise), we were able to visit good friends, and on the way back (because I didn’t realize how early we’d get off the cruise and so we could have flew back that day, but oh well) we relaxed at South Beach (Caid worked out and I read a book…I read many books on this trip:)) and ate Mediterranean food while checking my email for the first time in 6 days. It was really nice to be unplugged from the Internet (I was not paying $20 a day for it, per person).
It really does take a village for this to happen: my parents taking the girls, my aunt and uncle taking them to school, Anna and Carina making the weekend fun for them. I had to write up a whole hair plan for the girls, because well, that is a whole thing. There was getting extra work done before and after, cleaning the house because—WHO WANTS to come home to a dirty house? I am grateful for everyone’s help, and that we came back right before another holiday that gave more space to slide back into life.
I don’t think Caid or I would recognize us as we are now ten years ago. We aren’t who I thought we’d be, and the same for Caid. But we are a really beautiful mix of things, and it is something we are both proud of. Esau McCaulley puts it well in his memoir “How far to the Promised Land:” “Ours is like any marriage that lasts. We had to give up enough of ourselves to make room for the other person, but we had to retain a sufficient amount of who we were to avoid bitterness. All marriages become a third thing, neither one partner’s dream nor the other’s, but a different glory, an ordinary one we made together.”