Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

Just posting a link this time – too tired to write anything else right now:

http://obitsutah.com/memory_book.php?id=2017

I’ve been so busy trying to get ready for classes and finish my summer research obligations I haven’t had a chance to post anything. Not to worry. I’ll start posting again soon.

In the meantime, here’s a photo from our cruise I forgot to post:

formal night on the cruise ship; the backdrop is supposed to be the Titanic

Toren, who did sleep on the flight from Amsterdam to Atlanta, was still on Greek time, so he woke up at 2:30 ready to play.  Since I had gotten 3 hours or so of sleep on the flight, I got up with him and let Debi sleep.  We walked around the hotel until about 4:30, when we had to get up to get ready to go back to the airport.  We made it back to the airport fine and our flight to Tampa was uneventful.  We did use our meal vouchers (courtesy of Delta) to buy a bunch of donuts, though, and gave them out to various people.  Everything seemed fine when we arrived in Tampa, until one of our bags (my bag) didn’t show up.  When I asked about it, the baggage claim guy said it was still in Amsterdam according to their records, even though I carried it through customs in Atlanta.  That didn’t seem like a good sign.  Anyway, they said they’d send it to our house when they found it.  They did finally find it, the next day, and got it to us that afternoon.  So, trip complete.

Some thoughts on cruising with a young child:

• Cruises don’t really cater to really young kids (<3).  Yes, they have highchairs and cribs, and yes the staff are friendly, but kids in diapers or pullups are not allowed in any swimming pools on the ship.  Also, there is no childcare for really young kids.  There are no babysitters you can pay to watch your kid during the day.  The one daily activity they have for kids under 3 is about 45 minutes long and requires that a parent be there.  In short, cruise ships primarily cater to the old, fat, white people who predominate, then to other adults, then to their teen+ kids, then to kids between about 4 and 12 who get some special treatment.  If you are thinking about cruising with a kid under 3, don’t expect it to be all that easy.
• During one of the excursions, someone from our ship struck up a conversation with Brent and Suzy and asked them, “Are you the ones with the baby?”  Brent and Suzy said no, but that the baby was part of their group.  This person then said, “I would never travel to Europe with a baby.  How exhausting!”  Well, there is some truth to that.  Don’t expect to do all the things you could do on a cruise when you were single. On our previous cruises, we typically would go to the nightly shows and then go out dancing. With Toren, we were lucky we got up in the morning in time for our excursions (he slept in our bed and loves to kick me and toss and turn all night). Toren was reasonably well-behaved on the excursions (less so on the last two), but whenever we had an early morning excursion, we couldn’t help but crash in the afternoon before dinner.  We showered before dinner, and then after a nearly 2 hour dinner (with three courses), it was too late (8:30) to go do anything with the kids and too early to see any shows.  So, we ended up typically just going back to our room and waiting Toren out until he fell asleep.  So, yes, it’s exhausting.  But traveling is typically exhausting anyway, and so is parenting.  So, I don’t think it would have made much of a difference if we were home or on the trip – either way, Toren is a lot of work (and a lot of fun!).
• Finally, I also feel a bit guilty. Most of the staff on the ship are people from developing countries who are working on the cruise ship because this offers them a substantial improvement in life. But, they do this at great personal sacrifice. Our primary waiter, Brenda, had a child the same as age Toren, a girl. Brenda is on the ship for 7 months at a time, then home for 2. Her husband and parents take care of her daughter while she’s away. I can’t even imagine seeing Toren just 2 months out of every 9. Likewise, our room attendant, Angelina, from Mauritius, has three kids – 8, 12, and 15. She’s on the ship 6 months, then home 2. She’s been doing this for 6 years, which means she has been gone for ¾ of her children’s lives over the last 6 years. I only feel slightly better about this when I think that this means her children will have a better financial starting point than she did, but it still breaks my heart to think about how much of her children’s lives she is missing. Brenda said she cried everyday when she first came aboard the ship because she was missing her child so much. Having Toren on the ship reminds them of the kids they have left at home. So, it made me feel guilty.

Anyway, the trip was a lot of fun.  We got to see a lot of amazing things and spend time with family, which is really the point.  Some fun trip statistics for you:

• Countries visited: 5 (France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Holland – kind of)
• Miles traveled: 13,100 (excluding walking around locally)
• Photos taken: about 2,000, but I’ve deleted some since

I hope you enjoyed the trip report!

Between Katakalon and Venice the time changed, giving us an extra hour.  Unfortunately, I forgot to set my watch back.  So, I woke up at 5:00 thinking it was 6:00, then woke Debi up at 6:30 instead of 7:30.  Oops!  It worked out okay as we got to go the nice restaurant for breakfast one last time.  We then said goodbye to the rest of the family who had different travel arrangements home and disembarked.  Everyone else was staying onboard until 3:30 as their flights were late in the evening.  We made it to the Venice airport by 9:30 but couldn’t check in for our 2:30 flight until 2 hours before, which is some bizarre rule at that airport (maybe in Europe, generally?), so we played outside near the baggage claim for a few hours.  Since we still had all of our luggage, we pulled out some of Toren’s toys and let him play with them.  This attracted the attention of some other children waiting around, so Toren ended up making a couple of friends, an Italian girl and a British girl.

We finally headed up to check in around 12:00, but the line was already very backed up for our flight.  We got really worried that we would miss our flight, especially since traveling internationally with a lap child seems to require very complicated paperwork (it took us almost 20 minutes to check us in).  We finally made it past security with minutes to spare and made it to our plane just in time to board (at the very end of the line).  Additionally, for some reason our seats weren’t together, so Debi had to handle Toren by herself.  Meanwhile, I chatted with a nice couple from England (mostly the husband), who regaled me with a number of stories, mostly about Saint Anthony (he was a devout Catholic with a deep interest in Saint Anthony).  Toren did okay on the flight, luckily, so Debi wasn’t too upset about us sitting apart.  And the couple she sat next to were helpful and understanding.

Our connection was in Amsterdam.  We had to hurry through that airport as well as we didn’t have much time between flights.  Unfortunately, however, our flight out of Amsterdam was delayed by about an hour and a half, first because of a straggler, then because of a mechanical problem. The flight was relatively uneventful, but we didn’t get much sleep.

When we arrived in Atlanta, we were delayed pulling up to a gate as well, by about 20 minutes.  Once we disembarked, we literally ran through the airport to try to catch our connection to Tampa, but we arrived at the gate just as they sealed the door to the plane.  We were not alone.  There were about 8 of us on the flight from Amsterdam who were all trying to make the Tampa flight.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone around to help us reschedule, so we ended up traipsing through the airport for about an hour trying to figure out who could help us (there was an Italian family that didn’t speak much English that we were trying to help as well).  We eventually found a ticket agent, who set us up with rooms at a nearby hotel for the night and booked us on an early flight the next morning.  We checked into the hotel around midnight and had to be back at the airport at 5:30.

Our last day on the cruise was at sea as we were traveling from Katakalon (Katakolo) back to Venice.  I woke up around 6:00 am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I headed up to the library to do some work. The ship seemed empty at that time – a few people were in the hot tub, probably still up from the previous night, but I mostly saw ship staff cleaning. I grabbed some coffee and watched the sunrise in the library while working on my trip notes and looking at photos from the trip.

We really didn’t do much all day.  Toren and Debi slept in, then we went to breakfast.  At one point we went up to the 11th floor nightclub with Gary and Rosemary and blew bubbles for Toren to chase around, but that was about the extent of our activities.  We spent a good part of the day just getting everything packed up and ready to go home the next day.  It was actually quite nice to have the last day be just a day at sea so we could relax and get ready to go home.

After our last dinner in the nice restaurant we went to another show hoping Toren would do well like he did the previous night.  The show was a magician, Mark Taylor. He was pretty good with sleight of hand tricks, but his total show lasted 20 minutes before he had used up all of his material.  Some of his tricks weren’t even all that impressive if you know how some of them are done (Debi used to date a magician and so knows a lot of the tricks).  We went to bed shortly after the show ended.