Vacation

 Dear John,

To distract your daughter from the anniversary of your death, I took her on a cruise to the Caribbean.  We left out of Puerto Rico, and traveled from there to St. Thomas, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Barbados, Antigua, and St. Maarten.  You would never have gone on a cruise, because you were convinced that you would get sick from the food.  Well, as predicted, S got sick from the food.  Poor kid got a terrible case of food poisoning, and saw none of Barbados or Antigua.  She missed out on her snorkeling adventure.  She missed out on our hiking/beach tour.  In a way, it was good, because she needed a break from my bestie's kids - they were starting to drive her crazy.  But she was miserable for about 36 hours.  We did take a catamaran ride in St. Maarten, which she loved.  We picked up a cheap pendant in the expensive jewelry store chain on every island.  We bought a lot of t-shirts and a couple hats.  We had a nice dinner every evening, and ate a lot of steak.  

S is so much like you - irritated with me when I don't have every second planned and don't know everything in advance.  She doesn't want to wait for me to figure things out - she wants a plan and the plan should be very precise and preferably perfect.  I tend to get the broad strokes accomplished, and fill in the details as they happen.  I don't think she will ever really enjoy my style of vacation planning, so I don't see us doing much traveling together.  I have booked her senior trip to Italy and Greece - she said something about me going with, but...that's not my scene.  Sharing rooms with strangers and tour buses and stuff?  Pass.  That's for the young and adventurous.

I was frequently sad on the trip - it's hard to go places without you calling me all the time (not that you would have been able to on the cruise anyway).  It's hard to hear you say "I told you so" in my mind.  It's hard that you're not there to comfort S when she's experiencing things the way you would.  It's hard when the fun time I planned turns out to be not so fun.  I feel inadequate and disappointed.  Probably because I'm not up to conquering the world as easily as I could with your help.  I can't even decide if I should do the car maintenance - I know you would have skipped it and done some research to show that X doesn't need to be done until (future date) and Y is just nonsense.  But I don't know these things, and I'm not sure where you found your info, so it seems like spending the $300 is a better option.  Even though 90% of the service is "inspect."  Sigh...

I am currently exhausted because our return trip from Puerto Rico was ridiculous.  Our original flight was reasonable, so, of course, they canceled it almost immediately.  They rebooked us on a flight that left before our cruise docked.  I was finally able to find a flight that we could take, but it involved an overnight layover at JFK.  We were dropped at the airport at noon, and I was hoping to check our bags and maybe go back out into town.  But they don't let you check luggage until 3 or 4  hours before the flight, and we were there 8 hours early.  Then our flight got delayed until 10:45 pm. We almost didn't even make it to JFK - the pilot was about to time out for the day, if we hadn't gotten into the air.  Of course, that shortened our layover, so that was fine.  But then I had to go and pick up the dogs, and drive us home.  It's now the next day, and I'm still so tired from the lack of sleep since Sunday.  Once S gets home from managing the soccer game today, I will be going straight to bed.  I went to work for 5 hours and then had to take the rest of the day off.  Tomorrow is my work from home day, so that's good news.  Maybe by Thursday, I won't be such a zombie.  We shall see.

Love,

A