How We Traded Tans for Cowboy Boots

For all of you out there wondering what happened to our cruise vacation, here is the story in all it's sad, sad detail. My mother worked very hard to plan a nice vacation for my entire family. She spent months working with a travel agent and arranging all the details in an effort to provide her family with a memorable, funfilled family vacation. For her efforts we are all very thankful but unfortunately all the best laid plans mean nothing when an airport cancels your flight. We arrived at the Peoria airport on Sunday, December 27th. We had mounds of suitcases packed full of summer clothes, sunscreen, sandles and beachwear. We got in line and began the tedious process of checking in. Everyone was checked in except Mom and Dad and TSA had even scoured several of our suitcases already to be sure we weren't a terror threat. While Mom and Dad were checking in and just as the rest of us were ordering some lunch a voice over the intercom announced that the flight from Chicago to Peoria had been cancelled and therefore the return flight to Chicago...our flight....was also cancelled. Crap. So immedietly my parents started working to find us alternate travel plans and the rest of us ate and hoped for the best. The ticket agent did all she could and the cruise line who was in charge of our travel did all they could. There were no flights available that could accomadate 9 people and two lap children, our group was just too big and we weren't willing to split up. The lack of flights was frustrating but the cruise line made it worse by refusing to refund us our money even though we had trip insurance to cover catastrophes like this! Argg....so all of this took a couple of hours and left us with a lot of tears and feeling very sad, angry, frustrated and defeated. Our luggage was returned to us and we sat around wondering what to do next. All we could do was go back home. There wasn't enough time to drive to Florida and flying was out of the question so we officially were all packed up with nowhere to go. Once we got hom Dad told us it was lemonade time. We needed to figure out how to make this situation better. We had two options sit around, cry and feel sorry for ourselves or come up with plan B and make the best of things. We decided we were willing to drive somewhere but nowhere too far. Nashville was the farthest we would drive. We talked about a few places but nothing sparked our interest so we settled on Nashville thinking, hey at least it's south and it's a place at least some of us had been wanting to go to. Monday morning bright and early we drove our three cars down to Nashville and embarked on our new adventure. Turns out despite a number of setbacks and a string of bad luck we still had a very memorable and funfilled family vacation.