My Kidney Ate My Summer Vacation

-
So, this summer, we had an amazing trip to Iceland planned.  We were going to ride the small Icelandic ponies, soak in the blue lagoon, and stalk Bjork.  Instead I spent about a week in the hospital, found out one of my kidneys was dead and infected (that’s a twofer), got a nephrectomy tube for a while (look it up, it’s super gross), had surgery to remove said kidney, and couldn’t lift anything heavier than gallon of milk for about six weeks.  Goodbye, Iceland; hello, binge-watching Wild, Wild Country and home nurse visits.  What a great summer.

Oh, and when I wasn’t binging Netflix shows about cults, I started planning a reboot vacation around Thanksgiving holiday.  Iceland’s not as attractive an option in November as it is in August.  Enter Hawaii!  On reflection, this selection may have been in part unconsciously influenced by my watching the entire Brady Bunch Hawaii arc on MeTV while I was in the hospital.

Eager readers of this blog (by which I mean, Ned) will remember that it really started with a trip to the Big Island about five years ago.  It was a magical vacation.  This time, we booked an NCL Pride of America cruise that would take us to all the islands in mid-November.  As luck would have it, the day before we left ROC, an unexpectedly strong snowstorm left about 8 inches on the ground on November 15.  Hawaii, here we come!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Castle to Temple in Just One Day

-
Image
Our hotel has a theme of music that runs from the lobby through the elevators and into the rooms. Lyrics line the walls in tasteful handwriting. It gives the place a very welcoming, creative vibe. On our second morning in Dublin, we set off around brunch time for the other breakfast place recommended by our hotel, Lemon Jelly . We beat the line by a few minutes and filled up on yummy omelets, Irish breakfasts, and Americanos. It was history day in every possible way: on the schedule were the Dublin Castle, Book of Kells, Jameson Distillery, and a ghost bus. Plus some food in between. Our walk to the castle on this grey day took us past murals and lovely architectural elements. Dublin is a compact city, easy to walk with something to grab your eye around every corner. It's Ireland's largest, but even so, it has only about a half a million residents, a bit more than two-thirds the size of DC. There is great concern about the cost of living in Dublin, but according to internationa
Read more

There Will Be Glaciers

-
Image
After our port visits for the past few days, we were on to Glacier Bay.  According to our Freestyle Daily, we'd be arriving at the bay around 7:15 am, so I was up and out on deck early in anticipation.  There weren't many of us, and there wasn't much to see.  The skies were grey and the clouds were low--making for some dramatically moody photos but no glaciers were in sight. While the ship is in Glacier Bay, US Park Rangers are on board to answer questions, share information, and offer commentary about the glacier and the environment that produced it.  They tendered onto the ship early in the morning and set up shop in one of the lounges.  The map below shows the route we took into and out of the bay. As the morning moved along, the decks began to fill with eager glacier hunters, and I ran back to the rooms to wake everyone up.  (One thing we realized on this trip was that we really need to bring walkie talkies on our next cruise.  Now that we're all fu
Read more

300 Feet Below Ground ... What Started It All

-
Image
Sometime during the winter, CBS Sunday Morning (which we watch every Sunday as a family; Harper expresses great displeasure whenever Charles Osgood deigns to call in sick) ran a feature on the Mammoth Caves.  We watched in awe. "We want to go to there," we thought.  With a bit of time on Google Maps, we realized we could visit the caves in Kentucky and then visit Tennessee: Nashville, Memphis, Dollywood!  And so ... We're on summer vacation in the South.  As my Southern-born and named son Penn observed, "You know you're in the South when the church is selling fireworks as a fundraiser."  Note, he said this just as we pulled into Zaxby's--where fried chicken fingers are an art form. Our trip began in the land of another chicken delicacy: Buffalo.  After getting our Upstate-on at Anchor Bar. Fried pickles, wings, wing dip, wing nuggets, beef on weck? Um, yes. We settled down at the gate, where for the first time in my hundreds of f
Read more