The Vacation That Wasn't

Our bags were packed and our alarm clocks set. Our family had not been to a tropical destination in winter since the girls were born. And when Rob and I tried to figure out when we had last traveled in winter, we think we might have been in college. Needless to say, we were all pretty excited to travel to Jamaica Monday morning.

Rob checked the status of our fights right before going to bed to discover that because of possible snow in Atlanta (we would be connecting there to go on to Montego Bay), our flight had been canceled- just in case, I guess. We spent the next four hours on the phone with our travel agent and our travel insurance company trying to come up with the best alternate route to Jamaica. Due to the snow covering the country and the fact that it is winter break week, this was a challenge. For a while, we considered flying through Toronto or even spending the next night in Detroit, all to get to the beach. We finally went to bed after midnight, knowing that we wouldn't get to Jamaica the next day but with hopes that we could postpone by a day or two and still have a vacation.

The girls knew that we were to leave Monday morning and that we would be getting up super early to do so. They had fallen asleep singing, "Aruba, Jamaica...". At 6am, Caroline called me in, shouting "There's something wrong with my clock!" She had known we were to be up before six. Unfortunately, I had to let her know that there wasn't something wrong with her clock, but rather something wrong with her vacation.

After a full day of looking at all the various ways to get to Jamaica this week, we finally decided it wasn't worth it. We have taken our money (thank goodness for travel insurance) and are starting from scratch. We hope to travel over our spring break.

So instead of building sand castles on the beach yesterday, we built snowmen.