Florida, please don't be the death of me - 02.28.26

Today was the start of a family vacation to remember.

My mother, father, sister, and I embarked on our first large scale vacation together in years. Aside from wanderlust, I think that this trip originated to celebrate my sister's college graduation and it had to be scheduled before she started her first full-time post college job. Coincidentally, the timing of this trip aligned with my mother's birthday and retirement.

We flew out of ABE (Allentown, Pennsylvania) late afternoon and into PIE (Clearwater, Florida) mid evening. Our travels were smooth and we landed in Florida just before 7 PM. Both airports are relatively easy to navigate as they are on the smaller side. After our flight it was business as usual; gather luggage and retrieve our rental car. From the airport we drove to our booked hotel. Unfortunately, the quality of the hotel was either overlooked or misrepresented because it took us about two minutes once inside of our room to decide that we had to get out and find other lodging. We could not look past the sheer uncleanliness of our booked hotel and resorted to plan b. Before plan b, finding new lodging, we gathered ourselves at the Chick-fil-A across the street to fuel up and strategize. Plan b turned out to be far more complex as almost every reputable hotel nearby was completely booked out. Between my sister and I, we called nearly 10 hotels and only one had a single room left. The room was overpriced but we took it as we were out of options. We booked the last room available which ending up being a suite that had one king sized bed, and one pullout couch - my sister and I took the pullout couch in stride as our options were grim.

We survived through the night and thankfully the trip picks up moral as I recount our 7-night cruise to Cozumel, Mexico; Roatán, Honduras; Harvest Caye, Belize; and Costa Maya, Mexico. Tomorrow we would set sail the Norwegian Dawn.