Bodacious Boomer

I known for two months now that almost everyone I’m close to would be going on an Alaskan cruise starting today. I was really OK with it until about 3 weeks ago. Then I decided that I really wanted to go to. Years ago Doug and I traveled all over the northern US from Seattle to the Catskills doing summer festivals. By this time of the summer we usually had a nice little stash of money built up by now. Money we could have spent on say, a cruise. However, we quit going all over God’s country to work because it’s physically exhausting, you never knew what the weather would be like, and frankly we just got burned out. So we’ve stayed in TX and dealt with a lot of family matters. (You know what fun that is.)

So now, our summers are much slower paced. Unfortunately that also means the money is slower coming in also. On top of that, Doug did a bunch of renovation work which we have yet to be paid for. At any rate, about three weeks ago I went ahead and booked the same cruise, hoping and praying that one of the countless little old ladies that I had helped across the street in my lifetime would croak and leave me enough for two tickets.

Since no one croaked, my reservation cancelled out the following day at 6pm, or so I thought.  I accepted my fate. Almost a week later I received via email a notice from the cruise line that I had two fully paid tickets waiting for me. How this happened I do not know, but I was walking on air. I just took it as a gift from God. I waited another week to see if there would be another email stating that a mistake had been made. Nothing came. By  then I was starting to get excited and thinking about what I needed to get before the trip.

Now we’re only 10 days out. I thought I’d better go ahead and see what else I needed to do to be ready to go. I called the cruise line. Their agent was very nice, but perplexed. “I don’t understand this at all.” is what I was told. I told her that if this was a joke, it certainly wasn’t very funny. When she finally got back to me the next afternoon she informed me that it had been a computer glitch, and so sad, but no cruise for me. She was a super nice, and very apologetic about the mistake. Now that ship was going to go anyway, with or without me, so why didn’t they stand behind their system? I was going to get to Alaska on my own anyway and board the ship there.

According to the BBC this week, in Venice, Italy the Crown Plaza Hotel had a computer glitch. By mistake, their rooms were advertised online for the price of only $0.01 per night. Before the glitch was caught 230 people had booked rooms at a combined value of over $132,000. The hotel decided to stand behind their system and take the loss. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8202842.stm Good for them. I’m just glad Doug and I weren’t ready to board the ship in AL and then told of the snafu. That would’ve really sucked since from Houston to Seward is 4,479mi.

So instead of getting on a cruise ship today, I’m sorting my Tupperwear, discarding tops with no bottoms and bottoms with no tops. This really sucks.