My Kidney Ate My Summer Vacation

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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!

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